Old economists, old ideas, bad policies

Big data is being put to extensive use for microeconomic analysis. Older economists to whom the government pays attention are quite clueless about these forms of analysis

After watching or reading celebrity economists, the question needs to be asked: Why don’t old economists just fade away? By old I mean those over, say, 60.

I am not being peevish. It’s a serious question. I have been asking some young economists if they agree with me. They said yes, because most economists over the age of 50 have no interest left in the latest trends in the intellectual side of the discipline. It’s too much work.

Instead, they prefer to rely on what they learnt in the previous 30 years. For some, they said, even that’s too much work. So