They are an internet-spawned sub-culture who ‘practice the art of rationality’. This means they spend lots of time thinking about topics like cognitive biases, Bayesian reasoning, probability and statistics, computer science, AI, decision theory, game theory, transhumanism, etc. Demographically they skew heavily toward STEM students from elite universities and tech guys in the bay area.
Modern fundamental physics rests on two great pillars: General relativity, which describes gravity, and the Standard Model of particle physics, which accounts for the other three known ‘forces’ of nature—electromagnetism, the weak nuclear force, and the strong nuclear force. These are, as far as we currently know, all that exists.
In a previous post, I had a look at some major problems in the theoretical foundations of pretty much all macroeconomic models. To recap, they were as follows:
Alright folks, I’ll fess up right off the bat; I may have fallen face first into Betteridge’s law
Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.
Leaving aside the empirical support for this adage, it is true that the answer to the eponymous question is ‘no’. But, I’m trying to provoke discussion here alright. Gimme a break.
In this post, I’m going to give an overview of some major theoretical issues in modern economics.
In a typical undergraduate economics degree, you spend a lot of time drawing pictures like this: