Visualizzazione post con etichetta david warsh knowledge. Mostra tutti i post
Visualizzazione post con etichetta david warsh knowledge. Mostra tutti i post

giovedì 14 novembre 2019

CONVERGENZA O DIVERGENZA?

CONVERGENZA O DIVERGENZA?
Nell'eterna corsa all'oro, ci si chiede se i poveri raggiungeranno mai i ricchi oppure le distanze si amplieranno con i ricchi relativamente sempre più ricchi e i poveri relativamente sempre più poveri. Che ne dicono gli economisti? La risposta è differente a seconda del modello di crescita che si adotta. I più comuni sono due:
1) SOLOW: la crescita dipende dal capitale e il capitale ha rendimenti decrescenti. Se ho 10 schiavi posso frustarli finché voglio ma la loro produttività cresce sempre meno. Se ho una laurea posso prenderne una seconda ma la mia produttività non raddoppia. Nel mondo è abbastanza evidente che i paesi ricchi crescono molto meno di certi paesi poveri.
2) ROMER: la crescita dipende dalle idee e le idee hanno rendimenti crescenti. Perché nella Firenze rinascimentale registriamo una tale concentrazione di geni? Perché oggi il medesimo fenomeno lo vediamo all'opera nella Silicon Valley? Perché le idee sono contagiose: puo' goderne anche chi si trova nei paraggi e dare il suo contributo.
Secondo Solow la convergenza è inevitabile, ci ritroveremo tutti alla frontiera tecnologica. Secondo Romer la divergenza è il nostro destino, i ricchi saranno un puntino distante e sempre più piccolo.
Secondo Solow, nei paesi ricchi l'investimento ha importanza relativa, faremmo meglio a destinare più ricchezze verso chi ha veramente bisogno. Secondo Romer ha invece un' importanza fondamentale e non realizzarlo puo' costarci molto molto caro.
Personalmente, prendo Romer.

giovedì 25 luglio 2019

LA VIE EN ROSE

LA VIE EN ROSE

Alla base della crescita economica oggi – più che il capitale fisico – poniamo la conoscenza: se SO come coltivare un tipo di grano con spighe che ospitano il doppio dei chicchi, raddoppio la mia ricchezza. Speriamo che sia davvero così poiché la conoscenza è un bene che potenzialmente si diffonde a costi vicini allo zero (rendimenti crescenti).

Con questi assunti che fondano la nuova ortodossia il futuro è roseo e la crescita economica infinita.

Pensate, tra un secolo avremo anche una moltitudine di cervelli artificiali – ancora più potenti del nostro – che ci aiuteranno a conoscere, e magari anche costruire cervelli più potenti di loro. Probabilmente, potremo raddoppiare la nostra ricchezza ogni 5 anni, poi ogni anno, poi ogni giorno, poi ogni ora...

Ma che significa che la ricchezza di una nazione si raddoppia ogni ora (o ogni secondo)? Riuscite a immaginarlo? E’ fisicamente possibile? E’ logicamente possibile? E’ metafisicamente possibile?

mercoledì 24 luglio 2019

HL CHAPTER SIXTEEN In Hyde Park importante!!

CHAPTER SIXTEEN In Hyde Park
Note:16@@@@@@@@@@IL MODELLO: LA CONCORRENZA È GARANTITA DALL ESTEENALITÀ DELKA CONOSCENZA. MA QUAL È IL LIVELLO OTTIMO DI ESTERNALITÀ (IL LIVELLO CHE NN SCORAGGIA GLI INVESTIMENTI E VIMPEDISCE IL MONOPOLIO)? QUI LO STATO PUÒ AVERE UN RUOLO.

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Taking ideas seriously, Chicagoans liked to say, was what the university was about.
Note:IL MOTTO DI CHICAGO

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Milton Friedman had enjoyed remarkable success in his battle with Keynes, regularly going over the heads of his fellow economists to appeal directly to the general public.
Note:IN QUEL MOMENTO

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It persuaded countless young persons, including the youthful Romer, that conservative didn’t have to mean dumb.
Note:Ccccccccc

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Free to Choose, became a best seller.
Note:Ccccccccc

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George Stigler was still teaching in the business school.
Note:1980

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Meanwhile the mathematical tilt increased. Chicago had hired its first cutting-edge mathematical economist in 1971, a Berkeley Ph.D. named William “Buz” Brock. Brock in turn had scouted out Lucas and, in the same year, José Scheinkman.
Note:LA NUOVA GENERAZIONE

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Arriving later were Thomas Sargent, who today teaches at New York University, and Lars Hansen, still in Chicago.
Note:Ccccccc

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these were the New Classicals, great believers in the Invisible Hand, very high-tech, and appealing to the young.
Note:FRESHWATER MACRO

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Almost immediately a new group among the faculty emerged, labor economists, both theorists and econometricians who were more interested in what they could learn about the workings of particular markets than in generalizing about the behavior of the economy as a whole. Led by Gary Becker, Sherwin Rosen, Sam Peltzman, and James Heckman, these were economists operating more nearly in the old Marshallian tradition that Friedman had championed and that (with its Keynesian add-ons) Paul Samuelson had designated neoclassical.
Note:L ALTRA CHICAGO

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they still considered themselves to be applied price theorists—not literary economists by any means, but neither high-tech acolytes of the Modern movement.
Note:Ccccccc

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Romer might have said that he planned to characterize knowledge and show how it could accumulate in the same way as any other form of capital.
Note:IL PIANO

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the basic intuition: new products, new processes, entrepreneurs, universities, private research labs, patent law, scientific inquiry
Note:IL CUORE DELLA CRESCITA

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Things that had been pretty hard to sort out became much easier to say in math.”
Note:IL MEZZO DI ESPRESSIONE

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Romer wanted a model in which growth could continue indefinitely.
Note:LA CRESCITA INFINITA

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In the Solow model the economy inevitably reached a kind of adulthood in fifty or a hundred years and stopped growing altogether.
Note:EQUILIBRIO

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the philosophical histories of Polybius, Saint Augustine, Vico, Kant, Condorecet, Hegel, and Teilhard de Chardin.
Note:CLASSICI E PASSIONE X IL CICLO

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Solow model: the assumption that nations soon would converge to a steady state.
Note:EQUILIBRIO DI SOLOW

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internal dynamic of science: the more you learn, the faster you learn new things. If knowledge was the source of increasing returns, then accumulating more of it should mean faster growth
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IL MOTORE ROMERIANO

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But there was no readily available metaphor for the world that he imagined
Note:SCARSITÀ DI METAFORE

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Romer occasionally turned to the view of growth embodied in the popular television series Star Trek, about the distant future, in which nations rose and fell but the species went on innovating and expanding outward, if not forever, at least for a good long time.
Note:STAR TREK

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increasing returns to knowledge versus diminishing returns to land, labor, and capital.
Note:LA DIFFERENZA COL PASSATO

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“I’d been working on a social planner model like Ramsey, where the planner maximizes in the context of increasing returns to knowledge. I could get growth that was speeding up that way, which is what I wanted, but I thought that it couldn’t be decentralized into a competitive equilibrium.
Note:PROBLEMA DI STIGLER O PIN FACTORY

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it didn’t seem consistent with the market.”
Note:Ccccccccccc

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a single firm would take advantage of increasing returns to knowledge to monopolize its markets
Note:Ccccfff

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There was no fun in making a model of that, since it clearly was not what happened ordinarily,
Note:CCCCCCC

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The role of knowledge spillovers in Romer’s first model
Note:IL MECCANISMO CHE IMEDISCE IL MONOPOLIO

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beneficial externalities—would cancel out increasing internal returns.
Note:ECCO LO SPIRAGLIO

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there was the problem of multiple equilibria, meaning that, as always with positive feedback, things could come out in more than just one way. Perturbations might prove irreversible, rather than return to “normal.”
Note:UN PROBLEMA

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The biggest technical issue had to do with demonstrating the stability of the model.
Note:LA VERA SFIDA

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Once he built spillovers into his model, Romer had a world that looked much like Marshall’s system, though he wouldn’t have described it that way at the time. Perfect competition was preserved.
Note:RICORDIAMCI IL COLPO DI GENIO

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Solow had solved the problem by bringing in new knowledge from outside the model, as had Mill. Romer went in the opposite direction, as had Marshall: his accumulating knowledge came from new investments; it was then communicated to all the rest by means of spillovers.
Note:L ESTERNALITÀ GARANTISCE L ENDOGENICITÀ

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these external economies constituted a strong defense, at least intuitively, against the possibility that a single firm would take over the world,
Note:IL GRANDE MONOPOLIO

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read an editorial arguing that the space race had been good for economic growth,
Note:RAPPORTATO AL SENSO COMUNE

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“Dynamic Competitive Equilibria with Externalities, Increasing Returns and Unbounded Growth”
Note:L ARTICOLO

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A table of the best available data (that of Simon Kuznets) showed that since 1841 the rate of growth in the four leading industrial nations had been speeding up, not slowing down.
Note:NELL ARTICOLO ANCHE UN RIFERIMENTO ALLA REALTÀ

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During a climatological warming trend in the Middle Ages, presumably caused by perturbations in the orbit of Earth, he noted that the northern limit of grain cultivation in Europe crept a hundred miles to the north—a fact recognized by contemporaries. Farms were correspondingly more productive as a result. That was exogenous change, he wrote.
Note:SIGNIFICATO DI ESOGENO

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But when yields of domestic wheat rose steadily during those same years while wild grain yields remained the same, the change should be understood as having occurred within the system—that is, endogenously.
Note:SIGNIFICATO DI ENDOGENO

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Romer mapped out and carefully defined certain places where the market failed because inventors had insufficient reason to invest their efforts;
Note:FALLIMENTI DEL MERCATO

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About the policy implications of his model for growth, on the other hand, Romer was reticent—not surprisingly, perhaps, because the implications did not seem very Chicagoan at all. It appeared that government subsidies could sometimes improve economic performance.
POLICY

CHAPTER FIFTEEN “That’s Stupid!”

CHAPTER FIFTEEN “That’s Stupid!”
Note:15@@@@@@

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ELSEWHERE THAT SUMMER of 1980 a young student named Paul Romer prepared to return to graduate school.
Note:TESI SULLA CRESCITA

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his model would treat technological change as internal to its system instead of exogenous.
Note:LA CONOSCENZA AL CENTRO

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growth was actually speeding up, instead of slowing down.
Note:VELOCITÀ

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He would be taking what he had learned in Cambridge to the department that was its fiercest rival on the planet. There is nothing like putting yourself on both sides of a civil war to acquaint yourself with the inner workings of a controversy.
Note:INGRAZIATI I DUE FRONTI

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he was the second of seven children. His father was for many years a farmer, John Deere equipment dealer, aviation academy proprietor, home builder, ski area developer, and, eventually, a politician.
Note:LA FAMIGLIA

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For most of his undergraduate career, Romer planned to become a cosmologist.
Note:LA PRIMA IDEA

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Then, for a time, he thought of becoming a corporate lawyer.
Note:SECONDA IDEA

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He had learned a fair amount of economics over beer from his undergraduate roommate at Chicago, David Gordon (who is today a professor of economics at Clemson University),
Note:LUREA IN MATH INDIETRO IN EC

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“Anyone working inside economic theory these days knows in his or her bones that growth theory is not a promising pond for an enterprising theorist to fish in…. I think growth theory is at least temporarily played out.”
Note:AL MIT DELL EPOCA...X QUESTO SCELSE CGICAGO

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One day Davidson was presenting the Von Neumann model of growth to his class. This was the classic 1937 paper in which, among other things, Von Neumann employed topology to prove for the first time the existence of equilibrium
Note:IL PRIMO MODELLO INCNTRATO DA ROMER

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all inputs and outputs grow at a constant rate: a fixed set of goods “breeds” an ever larger collection of such goods, as if by magic. Steel produces more steel, corn produces more corn. Nothing changes; the economy just grows. At one point in the exposition, Romer blurted out, “But that’s stupid!”
Note:Cccccccccccc

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In the older model, technology was assumed to be unchanging for simplicity’s sake—growth was the product of capital multiplied by a technological constant
Note:CAPITALE...NN IDEE...VON NEW

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The Solow model was far more appealing than that. The rate of technical change was set exogenously, but at least technological knowledge was assumed to grow,
Note:SOLOW

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“In place of a discussion of new products, new processes, universities, private research labs, patent law, scientific inquiry—all the things that seemed to me then and still seem to me now to be at the heart of economic growth—the model blithely offers up an attractive mathematical assumption that cannot be given any meaningful interpretation.”
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IL PUNTO DEBOLE DI NEWMAN E SOLOW

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It would be better than Von Neumann’s, in that it would include knowledge. It would be better than Solow’s, too, in that the new knowledge would arise from purposeful decisions within the system.
Note:COME DOVRÀ ESSERE IL NUOVO MODELLO

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No one ever invested in R&D for private gain in the Solow model; everyone simply benefited from spillovers from government research.
Note:TUTTO PUBLICO IN SOLOW

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there were the Club of Rome Report, the Population Bomb, the End of Capitalism, and other gloomy scenarios. Pessimism extended deep into the economics profession itself.
Note:L ATTIVITÀ SFERA

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the economist Julian Simon and the supply-side journalist George Gilder,
Note:VOCI CONTROCORRENTE

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Romer took the other side of the argument. Human living conditions had been improving dramatically for at least a couple of centuries, he reasoned. Why not expect that the trend would continue? In his model, growth would continue indefinitely,
Note:UN MDELLO OTTIMISTA

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“I wasn’t thinking about picking a fight with the doomsters or about what government should do,” Romer said much later, when the work was done. “I just wanted to understand.
VOGLIA DI CAPIRE

HL CHAPTER FOURTEEN New Departures

CHAPTER FOURTEEN New Departures
Note:14@@@@@@@@@@I RENDIMENTI CRESCENTI NEL COMMERCIO INTERNAZIONALE...NN CONTA SOLO GEOGRAFIA CE ATTITUDINI MA ANCHE CHI COMINIA X PRIMO..C È SPAZIO X L INTERVENTO GOVERNATIVO

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In the history of economic policy, the 1970s were as much a watershed as were the 1930s—maybe more so. But it was not obvious at the time. The decade’s global economic turmoil presented a crisis of a very different sort from the Great Depression—double-digit inflation rather than stagnation; relative decline; vertigo, not despair.
Note:RIVOLUZ ALLI SETTANTA

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The spirit of the times was captured somehow by the title of a Led Zeppelin song (and later a concert film and finally a movie comedy about those years), “Dazed and Confused.”
Note:ZEPPELIN

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Why were some nations growing so much faster than others?
Note:IL PROBLEMA ALLA MODA

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Only later did it become clear, gradually, how the topic of growth was supplanting economic stabilization as the most interesting problem of the day.
Note:CRESCITA O STABILITÀ?

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SO IT WAS that a twenty-four-year-old MIT graduate student named Paul Krugman one day found himself listening to a California businessman describing his fears about how Japan was using its enormous protected home market as a practice field in which to prepare to conquer global markets.
Note:PROTEZIONISMO COME TRAMPOLINO...1978

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there exists a natural pattern of specialization among nations, based on national differences in natural resource endowments.
Note:ORTODOSSIA DEL COMMERCIO INTERNAZIONALE

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the conviction that automatic market forces inevitably would restore a “natural” pattern of trade and specialization.
Note:L IDEA DOMINANTE

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At one point Krugman wrote a paper on the economics of interstellar trade, as a joke, in which he sought to adjust interest rates to take account of general relativity.
Note:DIVERTISSMENT

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Yet, what if the businessman was right? Over the years many politicians and some economists—all the way back to Alexander Hamilton and before—had espoused the protection of infant industries
Note:PROTEZIONISMO INDUSTRIA NASCENTE

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Linder was thinking of Volvo, which had entered the automotive business during World War II, when the importation of most cars to Sweden was forbidden.
Note:ESEMPIO

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Suppose the Japanese were doing exactly what the Swedes had done, Krugman wondered, but on a grander scale?
Note:E SE IL PROTEZIONISMO GIOVASSE

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Young economists were still taught that monopolistic competition was a dead end,
Note:ORTODOSSIA

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As he began to think seriously about the problem, the difficulties started to resolve. Some goods in the model would be proprietary products, like airplanes, with no immediate substitutes. Their manufacturers could set their prices monopolistically (within reason). Other goods would be like corn: many sellers, many buyers, perfect substitutes.
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Their level would be determined by plain old supply and demand. Suddenly the road ahead seemed completely clear. He stayed up all night in excitement. “I knew within a few hours that I had the key to my whole career in hand,”
Note:MODELLO A PRODOTTI MISTI...

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using proper economic logic, he had demonstrated how it might be possible not just for a firm but for an entire nation to lock in certain advantages, to lock out competitors.
Note:COSA VIDE

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Krugman could show how increasing returns and general equilibrium might coexist.
Note:LA COESISTENZA

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If one country got a head start in mass production of some sophisticated good for which there were no near-substitutes—cars, say, or airplanes or silicon chips—it might keep it.
Note:INIZIARE X PRIMI È TUTTO E LA SPECIALIZZAZIONE È NULLA

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In the language of theory, there might be multiple equilibria: this was a highly subversive result, because it undercut the welfare theorems and implied a role for government.
Note:UN RUOLO X IL GOVERNO

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the vision was increasing returns to scale in several different industries engaged in international competition.
Note:L ELEMENTO CHIARIFICATORE

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“I recall the joy in Cambridge, Mass. when Kenneth Arrow made increasing returns respectable by formalizing it. [But]…I confess some irritation over Krugman’s defense of his international trade theory as new because it offers a well-worn truth in equation form.”
Note:IL MODELLO DI K NN È BEN ACCETTATO

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Strong praise from the citadel of perfect competition that for thirty years had been the University of Chicago! Such is the persuasive power of an equation that encapsulates a well-worn truth.
Note:GLI ELOGI SOLO DALLA PARTE AVVERSA...LUCAS

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economists now viewed international commerce as consisting of two broad tiers: an underlying trade in commodities and services characterized by perfect competition and driven by comparative advantage; and an upper level of monopolistic competition in which great multinational corporations abetted by friendly government subsidies periodically mounted assaults on each other’s markets, and specialization was determined by market size.
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IL NUOVO PARADIGMA

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then logic of the upper level was nothing more than the result of history—whoever had gotten to lawn mowers or airplanes or computers first.
Note:LA LOGICA DEL SECONDO

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Governments were continually prodded to adopt “industrial policies” and to engage in “strategic trade.”
Note:CONFERMA DELLA DIMENSIONE STORICA

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Supply-side economics
Note:L ALTRA RIVOLUZIONE DELL BEPOCQ

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Robert Mundell.
Note:PROTAGONISTA

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Jude Wanniski,
Note:L ALTRO

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in a 1978 book called The Way the World Works: How Economics Fail—and Succeed, Wanniski asserted that something he called “the Mundell-Laffer hypothesis” was revolutionizing the field.
Note:IL LIBRO

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Eventually, Dornbusch persuaded the Swedes to honor his old teacher with the Nobel Prize. But the citation dwelt on the contribution he made in the 1950s; it didn’t mention the supply-side years. And Mundell’s Nobel lecture, a disjointed defense of the gold standard, persuaded few.
Note:MUNDELL L EMARGINATO

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Robert Bartley, editorial-page editor of the Wall Street Journal.
Note:ALTRO SUPPLY SIDERS

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The supply-siders asserted that cutting taxes would make the economy grow faster, thus flatly contradicting the Solow model.
Note:LA TESI

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the supply-siders conducted their business in the newspapers.
LA CAMPAGNA

lunedì 8 luglio 2019

HL CHAPTER THREE What Is a Model? How Does It Work?

CHAPTER THREE What Is a Model? How Does It Work?
Note:3@@@@@@@@

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FEW PH.D. ECONOMISTS today read Adam Smith—any more than modern physicists learn their stuff from Isaac Newton.
Note:I PADRI

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He went back to the classics, to see how a phenomenon as obvious to the untutored eye as the growth of knowledge had been handled systematically by earlier generations of economists.
Note:L ATTEGGIAMENTO DI ROMER NEL 1986

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the story begins with The Wealth of Nations.
Note:ANCHE NEL CASO DEI RENDIMENTI CRESCENTI

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stories about his absentmindedness abound. How he walked out for air in his nightshirt and didn’t stop for fifteen miles. How he thrust a slice of bread and butter into a teapot, poured in, waited, poured out—and complained of the quality of the tea.
Note:ADAM LO SVANITO

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Much sometimes is made of the fact that as a baby he was kidnapped by gypsies. They left him in the next town down the road;
Note:ADAMO

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At fourteen he was sent to the University of Glasgow, where the tradition of experimental demonstration was strong.
Note:14

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No longer was it sufficient to explain the fall of stones or the rise of sparks by saying that it was “in their nature.”
Note:FINE DI ARISTOTELE

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Smith hated Oxford. There are several colorful passages in The Wealth of Nations in which he attacks the tenure system for having destroyed professors’ incentives to learn, or teach, or even meet their students.
Note:ACCADEMIA

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William Harvey was born in 1578,
Note:SOTTO....COSA SIGNIFICA SPIEGARE...COS È UN MODELLO

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The heart was conceived of by physicians and anatomists in those days, as it had been since the time of the physician Galen (first century A.D.), as resembling a furnace, or even the sun itself. The major organ of the body was thought to be the liver. It was there that food was turned into blood,
Note:I MEDICI DI ALLORA...ADORATORI DEL FEGATO

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Harvey concluded that the heart’s obvious heat was a secondary matter, that the muscle must serve as a pump rather than as a furnace
Note:POMPA O FORNACE?

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he showed that the heart pumps more blood into the arteries in half an hour—well over two gallons—than the entire body contains. Where else could it go but around in a circle?
Note:DIMOSTRAZ DI HARVEY...ARTERIE E VENE DOVEVANO ESSERE COLLEGATE DAI CAPILLARI

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they were infuriated by a model whose few simple assumptions brushed aside everything that they had struggled so laboriously to understand.
Note:REAZIONE DEI COLLEGHI

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Only with the invention of the microscope, some thirty years later, was the existence of the capillaries firmly established, exactly as Harvey had predicted.
Note:IL VENDICATORE DI H

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Gradually the new generation replaced the old.
Note:SPOILING

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“Science advances funeral by funeral.”)
Note:Cccccccc

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Harvey’s calculations amounted to one of the first mathematical models in history
Note:E VENIAMO A NOI

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“The Growth of Truth as Illustrated in the Discovery of the Circulation of the Blood,”
Note:LA CONFERENZA DI WILLIAM OSLER 1906

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It is thanks to these lectures that we know something about Smith’s views of what constitutes a satisfying explanation.
Note:LE LEZIONI DI EDINBURGO DI SMITH...IN PARTICOLARE L ASTRONOMIA

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“the discovery of an immense chain of the most important and sublime truths, all connected together by one capital fact [gravity], of which we have daily experience.”
Note:LA CATENA MECCANICA DI NEWTON....DIVIDIRE E COLLEGARE

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What we look for in an explanation, said Smith, is “a connecting principle” between apparently unrelated events.
Note:CONNECTIN PEOPLE

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Science is a search for the “invisible chains which bind together all these discordant objects”
Note:SCIENZA

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The enemy of good theory is promiscuous analogizing, Smith stated, the work of thinkers who endeavor to explain one thing in terms of another.
Note:ANALOGIA...IL NEMICO...ESEMPIO: I PITAGORICI SPIEGANO TUTTO IN TERMINI DI NUMERI

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Physicians were forever making extended parallels between physiology and the “body politic”
Note:ANATOMIA E POLITICA

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“Money is the Fat of the Body-politick, whereof too much doth often hinder its agility, as too little makes it sick…”).
Note:ESEMPIO DI PETTY

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“There is no break, no stop, no gap, no interval.”
Note:NELLA BUONA SPIEGA

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if it cannot be said in plain language, said Smith, it probably is not right.
Note:SEMPLICOTÀ

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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.”
Note:IL TITOLO DEL LAVORO PRESENTATO A FRISCO

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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

Yellow highlight | Location: 573
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.
Note:TECH DIFFER

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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.
Note:Cccccccc

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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
Note:Ccccccccccc

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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

martedì 18 giugno 2019

CHAPTER TWO “It Tells You Where to Carve the Joints”

CHAPTER TWO “It Tells You Where to Carve the Joints”
Note:2@@@@@@@@@@

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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,
Note:Cccccccc

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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.
Note:Ccccccccc

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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.”
Note:IL TITOLO DEL LAVORO PRESENTATO A FRISCO

Yellow highlight | Location: 546
“these equations are so simplistic and the world is so complicated.”
Note:LA CLASSICA OBIEZIONE CHE ROMER RESPINGE

Yellow highlight | Location: 547
equations “don’t tell us anything new.”
Note:ALTRI

Yellow highlight | Location: 560
Modelers focus on the issues that are easy to formalize, and defer the more difficult issues for a later day,
Note:TIPICO

Yellow highlight | Location: 561
“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

Yellow highlight | Location: 566
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

Yellow highlight | Location: 572
The “old” growth theory associated with Robert Solow
Note:IL NEMICO DI ROMER

Yellow highlight | Location: 573
There are conventional economic inputs. And there is “exogenous” technology,
Note:IL MONDO DI SOLOW

Yellow highlight | Location: 576
technology can be employed by any number of persons at the same time.
Note:TECH DIFFER

Yellow highlight | Location: 578
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

Yellow highlight | Location: 579
The government provides it, through universities.
Note:Cccccccc

Yellow highlight | Location: 582
New growth theory divides the world along different lines—into “instructions” and “materials,”
Note:LA LANCIA VITÀ

Yellow highlight | Location: 584
“instructions” will become “ideas” and “materials” will become “things.”
Note:NEL PAPER SUCCESSIVO

Yellow highlight | Location: 586
atoms and bits
Note:Ccccccccccc

Yellow highlight | Location: 589
The key distinction, he says, is no longer between public and private but between rival and nonrival goods
Note:ALTRA ALTRE VITÀ

Yellow highlight | Location: 594
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

Yellow highlight | Location: 600
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

Yellow highlight | Location: 619
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