Return to the Econ

Joshua Gans revisits life among the econ, 50 years after the classic investigation by Axel Leijonhufvud.

In Leijonhufvud’s time, economics was dominated by two super-castes which worshipped totally different totems.

Right now, nonetheless, the super-castes are hardly to be seen and the outdated totems have been changed by a singular new totem:

The know-how powering the Econ runs on one treasured useful resource, d’ta, and the work of acquiring that d’ta rests with the grads. Upon arrival within the dept, they’re instantly despatched into the D’ta Mines and tasked with accumulating seemingly unattainable portions of the useful resource. They toil in soiled and unsanitary circumstances. Mockingly, their subsequent activity is to painstakingly clear and polish the d’ta they’ve extracted separately — typically tens of millions of particular person objects — to allow them to then be sorted and made accessible for processing. With luck, the grads could also be assigned processing duties that happen in windowless rooms twenty-four hours a day working a single machine. The hope is that they will then produce the brand new excessive achievement of the Econ, a tabl. It’s onerous to explain what a tabl is to outsiders, but it surely represents the result of finely processed d’ta. The extra the tabl incorporates brilliant, bejewelling within the type of star-like symbols (*), the extra beneficial it’s. Failure to create a sufficiently dazzled tabl means being despatched again to the mines.

The publish Return to the Econ appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.