Economists Do It With Models

One of the conveniences of the new CPI website is the commentary section— being able to quickly preview a variety of blogs from one page. This page inspired our new CPI Blog o’ Blogs newsletter, compiling fun competition blogs from around the world. As the editor, both of these features has had an added benefit—I’ve found that the need to spend time in the blogosphere to find unusual entries regarding antitrust and other economics is really quite a lot of fun.

In today’s Wall Street Journal, for example, the paper uses the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index to determine whether the Celtics will beat the Lakers, (see http://bit.ly/aUt6Ro).Even if you’re not a basketball fan, it’s an interesting application of antitrust economics.

And it has also occurred to me that many of our readers may occasionally have a question about micro- or macro-economics to which they’d like a quick answer, but don’t have a convenient economics professor nearby. So I’ve added to our blog scroll on the commentary page a new blog, “Economists Do It With Models: Warning, Graphic Content.”This is an informative and enjoyable website run by EconGirl where non-economists (and perhaps some rusty ones) can find answers to such varied questions as, “How Do I Become a Behavioral Economics Nerd?” or a discussion of incentives called, “So you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink…what happens when you try to get him to drink but he doesn’t know how and falls in the lake instead? In addition, there are videos on varied economic concepts from elasticity to game theory. The information is serious; the attitude isn’t.