CHAPTER TWO “It Tells You Where to Carve the Joints”
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Dynamic programming and matrix algebra. Markov processes and Euler equations. Nonparametric covariance estimation for space-time random fields.
Note:L APPARATO MATEMTICO DEL MEETING
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To discover the institutions through whose workings technical economics changes from year to year, it is necessary to go behind the scenes,
Note:I VERI CAMBIAMENTI
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The easiest place to discover them is the exhibition hall.
Note:CONVERSAZNI NELLA HALL
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which textbooks are being assigned in colleges, junior colleges, and universities in the coming year.
Note:IL VERO AFFARE...I MANUALI DA ADOTTARE
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Around 850 new Ph.D.’s have graduated annually from U.S. universities for the last few years—perhaps about as many again in other universities around the world. In contrast, some 15,000 physicians are minted annually in the United States. Around 4,400 dentists. More than 6,600 Ph.D. engineers. Nearly 40,000 lawyers. And about 120,000 M.B.A.’s.
Note:UN SISTEMA SELETTIVO....LE OCCASIONI NN SONO MENO APPETBILI CHE ALTROVE
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In economics, as in basketball, it is relatively easy to tell who has major-league potential.
Note:TALENTO
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desire to seek, patience to doubt, fondness to meditate, slowness to assert, readiness to reconsider, carefulness to dispose and set in order,”
Note:OCCORRE PIÙ CHE LA MATEMATICA....SIR FRANCIS BACON
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“thinking economically,
Note:LA QUALITÀ PRINCIPALE
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recruits are drilled relentlessly in the use of the techniques and tools they must master in order to begin, ever so tentatively, their professional careers. The best schools don’t even bother with a text. Instead, there are lectures and assigned readings, followed by endless sets of problem to be worked out.
Note:LA MATRICOLA
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learning to speak a new language fluently.
Note:ANALOGIA
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having received the dogma, must learn to think for themselves. Then a thesis.
Note:I SEMINARI DEL TERZO ANNO
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When the thesis is nearly complete, the newly minted Ph.D.’s enter a job market that resembles a professional sports draft, one in which each year’s entrants are well advertised to potential employers in advance.
Note:INFINE
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Only a handful from each graduating class will eventually enter the research hall of fame. But nearly all will enjoy a full career.
Note:TUTTI PIAZZATI
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the cocktail parties that are given in the evenings by the various university departments for their alumni and friends.
Note:UN ISTITUZIONE DEPL MEETING
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Departments are like so many major-league sports teams, not just hiring entry-level economists but also making offers to stars in other departments
Note:IL CFR TRA GIGANTI
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meeting-goers stream out into the night to restaurants around the town.
Note:ALTRO LUOGO RILEVANTE
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The journal article is the basic vehicle of a career in economics,
Note:IL VEICOLO
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In economics the referees don’t wear striped shirts, the job is usually done sitting down, and nobody does it full-time. The main difference is that scientific refereeing is performed anonymously.
Note:REVISIONE
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Referees, of course, may instantly recognize the distinctive stamp of a colleague’s work, just as authors often are aware of their referees’ identities.
Note:DI FATTO
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A useful definition has it that “economics is what economists do.”
Note:COROLLARIO
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Norman Campbell’s famous formulation of scientific aims, economics is “the study of those judgments [about certain phenomena] concerning which universal agreement can be obtained”
Note:LA SCIENZA
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The good behavior of referees is reinforced by the fact they, too, are scientists. Their own papers will be submitted to other referees.
Note:CRCOLO
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A good deal of back-scratching and favor trading takes place.
Note:NN TUTTO È XGETTO
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Indeed, refereeing is perhaps the single most effective way to demonstrate good citizenship and to assess character. Journal editors are selected from those who serve most successfully as referees.
Note:UN SUCCESSO
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Most pathbreaking contributions—not many, most—are rejected several times before they finally find a home.
Note:TUTTAVIA
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the Journal of Political Economy, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the American Economic Review, and Econometrica.
Note:THE BIG FOUR
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the convention of the American Economic Association that was held in San Francisco in January 1996.
Note:ENTRIAMO NELLO SPECIFICO
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It was there that the new ideas were presented to a general audience for the first time.
Note:ARRIVA ROMER
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the papers presented at the Meetings are only a certain part of technical economics. The hardest work, real economics, is done elsewhere,
Note:ESTRATTI
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The 1996 San Francisco meetings, for example, were organized by a Stanford University economist named Anne Krueger.
Note:LA PRESIDENTA
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adviser to the government of Turkey,
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In San Francisco in 1996 a luncheon would be given for John Nash, winner of the Nobel Prize the year before. The mathematical genius had been confined to the sidelines for thirty years by schizophrenia, but he grinned sheepishly in the San Francisco limelight.
Note:ALCUNI EVENTI DI QUELL EDIZIONE
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A scholar had to be invited to give the Meetings’ most important address (the Ely Lecture); Krueger chose Martin Feldstein, who used the occasion to call for the privatization of the U.S. Social
Note:ALTRO EVENTO
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The biggest draw in San Francisco turned out to be a fifty-four-year-old economist named McCloskey, a conservative former University of Chicago professor,
Note:ALTRO EVENTO
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during the autumn had undertaken a change of gender. Donald had become Deirdre.
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Graciela Chichilnisky was suing a colleague, for allegedly having misappropriated her ideas.
Note:ALTRO EVENTO
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Card was handsome, rich, and winsome. But he had coauthored a controversial book about experiences with the minimum-wage law that had angered the more conservative of his fellow labor economists. In a session just before the award, a group of Chicagoans on the dais jumped him with scathing critiques of his statistical methods.
Note:ALTRO EVENTO...L AGGUATO A CARD
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Like most of the other discussions, Session 53 of the Meetings was held in a windowless room.
Note:MA IL VERO EVENTO ALLORA PASSÒ INOSSERVATO
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30 P.M. on Friday, January 5, 1996, in Plaza Ballroom B of the San Francisco Hilton
Note:DOVE E QUANDO
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“New Growth Theory and Economic History: Match or Mismatch?”
Note:TITOLO DELL EVENTO
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two groups who usually don’t have much to say to one another: economic historians and leading theorists of economic growth.
Note:I PIÚ INTERESSATI
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University of Chicago professor Robert Lucas reminded his colleagues of a riddle known loosely as “the problem of increasing returns”
Note:UN ANTICIPATORE ...NEGLI OTTANTA
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Neo-Schumpetrian Economics. The New Economics of Imperfect Competition. The New Economics of Technical Change. The Increasing Returns Revolution. New Growth Theory. Or, most simply and obscurely, Endogenous Growth.
Note:I TANTI NOMI APPIOPPATI
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Joel Mokyr, author of The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress, is in the chair. He is the foremost of the new generation of economic historians who are working on the problem of technical change.
Note:PRESIDENTE
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Crafts is the proprietor of what is known among economic historians as the Crafts-Harley view of England’s industrial revolution, to wit, that there was no industrial revolution,
Note:UNO SCETTICO DELLA NEW GROTH THEORY
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His reputation is as among the most mathematical of the new generation.
Note:SALE SYL PALCO ROMER...IL PIÙ ATTESO
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it placed him in opposition not only to his teacher Lucas but to the entire Chicago tradition of taking perfect competition as its most fundamental assumption.
Note:IL NUOVO LAVORO DI ROMER SUI RENDIMENTI CRESCENTI ...1990
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Romer has been insistent all along about the power of mathematical methods. They state problems more clearly and solve them with greater clarity and persuasive power
Note:LA FEDELE COMPAGNA
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logic and evidence “have a power that transcends the wishes, beliefs and preferences of the people who use them.
Note:LO SCOPO
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“Why Indeed in America? Theory, History and the Origins of Modern Economic Growth.”
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“these equations are so simplistic and the world is so complicated.”
Note:LA CLASSICA OBIEZIONE CHE ROMER RESPINGE
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equations “don’t tell us anything new.”
Note:ALTRI
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Modelers focus on the issues that are easy to formalize, and defer the more difficult issues for a later day,
Note:TIPICO
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“The sensible approach is not to shut down the development of formal theory, but to tolerate a division of labor in which natural language and formal theorizing continue in parallel. Specialists in each camp can address those issues in which they have a comparative advantage and periodically compare notes.”
Note:LA SOLUZIONE ROMER
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Romer borrows the familiar example of the steam engine. A famously bad explanation offered by an engineer in the mid-nineteenth century ascribed its motion to a “force locomotif” (in a similar way Aristotle had attributed the fall of stones to their “inner nature”). A more satisfying explanation says Romer, divides the steam engine into component parts—firebox, boiler, steam governor, and so on—in order to account for the working of the locomotive overall. “What theories do for us is take all the complicated information we have about the world and organize it into this kind of a hierarchical structure,”
Note:LA SPIEGA SCIENTIFICA....SCOMPORRE...RIDURRE
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The “old” growth theory associated with Robert Solow
Note:IL NEMICO DI ROMER
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There are conventional economic inputs. And there is “exogenous” technology,
Note:IL MONDO DI SOLOW
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technology can be employed by any number of persons at the same time.
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For the purposes of the analysis, technology is viewed as being essentially a public good, freely available to anyone who wants some.
Note:L IMPLICITO IN SOLOW
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The government provides it, through universities.
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New growth theory divides the world along different lines—into “instructions” and “materials,”
Note:LA LANCIA VITÀ
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“instructions” will become “ideas” and “materials” will become “things.”
Note:NEL PAPER SUCCESSIVO
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atoms and bits
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The key distinction, he says, is no longer between public and private but between rival and nonrival goods
Note:ALTRA ALTRE VITÀ
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Humans use non-rival instructions together with rival goods (like pots, pans or machine tools) to transform other rival goods, rearranging them into new configurations that are more valuable than the old ones.
Note:IL PROCESSO
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Since an idea can be copied and used over and over, its value increases in proportion to the quantity of the rival materials it can be used to transform: the larger the market, the greater the payoff to a new idea. More widgets can be sold in a big city than in a small town,
Note:IL FRUTTO DI UN IDEA
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The new ideas have not yet found the proper path to widespread understanding. The natural resistance to them is great.
L ESITO DELLA PRIMA PRESENTAZIONE
