According to Business Week: Tyler Cowen is America’s Hottest Economist.
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Cowen says that most economists don’t read, at least not widely.
Robert Frank, who teaches economics at Cornell University, agrees.
He says the ascent to tenure leads young economists toward math and small questions.
Universities hold on to only the leading figures in each academic sub-specialty.
“You want to climb to the top of a hill,” says Frank, “and it’s a lot easier to climb to the top of a small hill than a big broad one.”
There’s an idea among academic economists that the privilege of writing a narrative argument must be earned through the hard work of modeling and econometrics.
“There is a view that what can’t be disproven isn’t science.”
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The Homa Files 