06.19a. A Good Economics Discussion. I had a
good weekly meeting with my
graduate students yesterday. Like the law-and-econ lunch of the previous day, it was
true scholarly discussion. We talked about the meaning of heteroskedasticity; its
translation into Chinese; the profitability of niche translations of books such as
Kennedy's Econometrics into Korean, Chinese or Indian languages (unprofitable in this
last-- any reader would already know English); the importance of learning to think in
English as one reads scholarly publications; the relative merits of Hinduism and
Christianity for economic development (Hinduism gives too many second chances of future
reward for present conduct); the decline of Confucianism in Korea; the benefits of pride
of ancestry; the meaning of social capital in terms of the prisoner's dilemma or of
empirical measurement; the difficulty of getting other scholars to comment on one's
papers and the gratitude of even big names for comments; how to get computer space and
write simple webpages in HTML; the lack of motivation for government economists to
publish scholarly papers; whether envy hurts promotion chances in government; reasons
for the superiority of American universities in
teaching and research.
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