“Economics is a subject that does not greatly respect one’s wishes”*…
From “Macroeconomic policy and the optimal destruction of vampires” (1982) by Dennis Snower
A not-so-dismal look at the “science” of economics: “the world’s first and only stand-up economist” Yoram Bauman reviews the weirdest and most wonderful papers ever published in economics journals… Consider, e.g.,
“Japan’s Phillips Curve looks like Japan” (2008) by Gregor Smith
Smith’s webpage used to link to a version of the paper with this note: “The title is also the abstract and, frankly, most of the text.”
Japan’s Phillips Curve is shown in the right-hand panel of Figure 1. The data are monthly from January 1980 to August 2005.
For ease of viewing, the left-hand panel of Figure 1 rotates the Phillips Curve around the vertical axis so that minus the unemployment rate now is on the horizontal axis. Clearly visible are the islands of Hokkaido and Honshu, though it is somewhat difficult to separately distinguish the southern islands of Kyushu and Shikoku. The Noto-Hanto Penninsula is evident to the north of the southern end of the main island of Honshu. Tokyo Bay is also visible. The data point to the far left in Figure 1 is the island of Fukue-Jima.
Ten others– including Bauman’s own hysterical take-down of Gregory Mankiw and “On the efficiency of AC/DC? Bon Scott versus Brian Johnson,” featured here in pre-blog times– at “Top 11 Funniest Papers in the History of Economics.”
* Nikita Khrushchev (widely attributed)
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As we search for one-armed economists, we might spare a thought for Charles Darrow; he died on this date in 1967. It was Darrow who took a Quaker game that inveighed against acquisitiveness and turned it into the monopoly that is Monopoly.
