Who says economists don’t have a sense of humor? Well, maybe you will, after you find out
that I admit to having chuckled over these accounts. Judge for yourself.
From Alex Tabarrok at
Marginal Revolution:
A famous economist is
trying to capture terrorists by combing through data on banking records. Wimpy. Wimpy. Wimpy.
A real rogue economist would go after them with his bare hands.
From
Institutional Economics:
There is not a single asset class that has not been pronounced as being in a ‘bubble’ in recent
years. My working definition of a bubble is anything that goes up in price faster than The
Economist magazine can understand.
And if you’ve never heard the story of how P.T. Barnum came (incorrectly) to be credited with
the phrase, “there’s a sucker born every minute,” it’s truly an all-time great one (scroll down for story).
Did you see the paper linked at Institutional Economics arguing that high NASDAQ valuations in 2000 were rational, rather than a bubble, since uncertainty about future profits increased the value of the firms:
http://www.smarteconomist.com/insight/68
I thought that one was particularly hilarious. I have been involved with pitching VCs on a number of occasions, and my experience is that uncertainty about future profitability is definitely not a desirable value-enhancing feature of the deal!
My impression of the late 90s was that most VCs and investment bankers were quite cynically unloading what they knew were bad deals onto an investing public that was naive about technology stocks, and in too much of a state of greed-induced euphoria to apply common sense.
Of course, for economists with a sense of humor:
http://netec.mcc.ac.uk/JokEc.html
Another source of jokes about Economics is
http://www.econjokes.com
If an economist developed the technology to link attacks with market signals, economics presumably assumes that he would keep the secret under wraps and use it to profit from future attacks?