No one on the internet likes paying for access to content. After 35 years we have not found a way to monetize except ad tech.

Is that so hard to understand?

Every time someone links an article on this website from an expensive print publication, there is immediately a link in the comments to a paywall-evading site!

The dialog around ads on HN is extremely low quality, highly focused on costs and with no attention at all paid to benefits.

I’d love an estimate from you (or anyone) about the marginal effect on the profession’s “legitimacy” (which is what? and how’s it measured?) from having the prize include Nobel’s name vs. not including it.

Really we don’t care.

Mokyr’s northwestern website has links to a lot of his papers.

An extremely crude selection rule:

Anything published in the American economic review, quarterly journal of economics, journal of political economy has the profession’s “highest stamp of approval”. It’s really hard to publish anything there. (There are two journals im not listing in that “top” category but he has no papers there on his website.). On aghion or howitts websites, look for the above journals but also econometrica and the review of economic studies. Those are the “top five” in the field.

There are surely papers in good history and Econ history journals on mokyr’s website but I don’t know the journals!

Standards for any chapter in a “handbook of X economics” or “handbook of the economics of X” are high - those should be good surveys.

Similarly a paper in the “annual review of economics”

Also mokyr has a bunch of work on Amazon. “The lever of riches” is a classic. “A culture of growth” is well regarded.

Finally he has a forthcoming book called “two paths to prosperity” with two other distinguished guys - one Econ historian (greif) and one political economy guy (tabellini). It’s coming out in about three weeks. Good timing, Princeton U Press!

Aghion and howitt have a growth textbook at the advanced undergrad level called “the economics of growth.”

They have a much more advanced work called “endogenous growth theory” which is for specialists (or at least anyone with first year PhD macro)

Aghion has a book called “the power of creative destruction.”

Barro also has an old undergrad macro text which is good

The gap between undergrad macro and professional macro is extremely large. That shouldn’t dissuade you it’s just a note.

An unexpected (to me!) prize but definitely a good one.

What’s notable is that mokyr’s research is very, very accessible to a layman. You can read his books and understand them nearly perfectly without needing substantial technical background. (Of course there’s a huge existing literature in economics and history he’s engaging with which you won’t know, but I’m not an economic historian either so a lot of it is unfamiliar to me too.). Try it! Hopefully you learn something.

Also the committee always releases a good non-technical summary of the laureates work and an even better “more technical” summary. You can start there for an overview.

As for the point which will be raised endlessly here that this is “not a real Nobel” - whatever. No one in the economics profession cares. Alfred Nobel doesn’t have a monopoly on prizes or priority to decide which fields are worth recognizing. It’s our highest prestige prize. Call it what you want.

It’s worth reading

This is a weird stunt that won’t prove anything. If he (magically) made it in a week people would still fly.

What’s the point? Don’t say “raising awareness”. Whose mind does the exercise have a chance of changing about what question? What behavioral change will that changed mind cause?

At the least the anecdote is not that informative about the effects of AI, given the details.

Go to the city and ask for permission to replace two lots with five story apartment buildings with a view into his backyard. He’ll sue immediately and if he can’t stop it he’ll move.

No doubt it’s impossible to even get permission to do so (which is a separate problem!), but if those whiners really want revenge on the guy who they think “ruined their neighborhood” there’s one option they aren’t pursuing.

- “The climate crisis and socio-ecological issues are broadly absent from economic curricula.”

-> I don’t believe that for a second. Externalities are taught in every Econ 101 class I’ve ever heard of.

“75% of universities do not teach any ecological economics”

-> as a whole class maybe not but that doesn’t mean the material doesn’t get covered.

“ instead, when issues of ecological sustainability are taught, environmental damage is considered as something that needs to be priced into market mechanisms.”

-> which is a completely normal, standard idea among economists for good reason!

“Economics education does not address historical and contemporary power imbalances”

-> that’s not our job? Wtf - that’s not part of economics at all. Does it get covered in statistics? In history? I don’t know who’s responsible but it’s not us.

“55% of universities do not provide meaningful teaching on questions of historical slavery, colonialism, or neocolonialism at all. History and ethics are absent from these discussions.”

-> economics departments are not being held responsible for this supposed omissions but I really doubt this supposed fact is true. Does an American history class count or not ? It’s just not possible that slavery is not taught.

“Mainstream neoclassical economics dominates the economic theories taught.”

-> also a good sign as that’s the standard. We don’t teach Marxist thought anymore. That’s progress.

“Of the 480 theory modules we graded, 88.3% of them included mainstream neoclassical economic thinking focusing on rational, self-interested individuals.”

-> Show me any alternative that’s credible. Also: behavioral methods are widely taught. We are plenty criticism of our own models. That’s also Econ 101 material.

“They are almost entirely taught through quantitative technical skills.”

->. Good. Also: as opposed to…? What exactly?

“Economics is taught in isolation from other social sciences. The discipline of economics should be embedded within the social sciences, and students should be encouraged to learn across other disciplines such as politics, sociology, geography, and history, but for the most part, it remains siloed”

-> that’s true of what happens in every other department too. Leave it up to universities to set distribution requirements.

“There are two programmes that are critical, climate-conscious, and provide an economics education fit for the 21st century. SOAS and the University of Greenwich introduce students to a range of intellectual and methodological perspectives within the economics discipline. They put a learning focus on climate, power, and inequality throughout the course.”

-> eye roll.

Fact:

“Matt stoller gets big, important issues wrong in antitrust all the time and his analysis shouldn’t be taken seriously.”

Source: me

You are welcome to cite that.

Having experience teaching the subject myself, what I saw on that page is about the first five minutes of the first class of the semester at best. The devil will very much be in the other 99% of what you do.

Define it narrowly enough, and Firm A buying Firm B might create a monopoly - the regulator cannot approve that.

Define it broadly, and Firm A buying Firm B takes the market from 21 firms to 20 - the regulator is unlikely to stand in the way.

(In practice the market definition question in the US will often happen in front of a judge and the two sides are the merging parties vs. the regulator (FTC or DOJ).)

In this case, is the relevant market “restaurant delivery service via an app” ?

In that case five firms is (likely) moderately concentrated at last. (If you have the market shares of the five firms, you can compute an index called the HHI to get a rough sense of how much more concentrated the market will be before and after a merger.)

However… “app based food delivery” doesn’t seem like a credible market to me. The firms are unlikely to have pricing power either over restaurants or customers.

Candidate competing markets:

- going to the restaurant directly

- making food at home

- delivery provided by the restaurant

Any one of the five firms currently in the market who wanted to buy another would argue to include all three as the “relevant market” in which case their share (both before and after) is tiny.

The regulator will argue for a narrower definition.

When you see commentary on this website about “X is a monopolist” or strong claims like that (which are made frequently!), almost never is there any appeal to a market definition!

Fortunately judges get better input than HN commentators.

And the title should be “…who speak many languages.”

Speaking one language may be something of a mystery but to most of us it’s at least a familiar state.

Elon Musk is failing to cut American spending https://economist.com/finance-and-economics/2025/02/12/elon-... from The Economist

tl;dr: DOGE is having zero impact on federal spending.