The moves suggest the battle for star economists is heating up. Economics powerhouses like Harvard and MIT have the resources and reputations to easily buy up the best talent. But up-and-coming departments “need to make a bunch of hires at the same time, so that each [hire] will be confident there will be plenty of good people to work with,” said Mr. Wolfers of the Wharton School. He and Ms. Stevenson plan to decide on their destination in coming weeks.

Established or not, economists are hot commodities. Last year, the average starting salary for new assistant economics professors was nearly $112,000 – the highest ever in inflation-adjusted terms and one of the highest across academic departments, according to the American Economic Association.

But he took his lessons to more unexpected, and depending upon how you look at it, somewhat disturbing places. At school, students were asked to form teams and go out onto the streets and raise money for kids with cancer. His team had to choose a location and that is where he informed me that he used his game theory. On their street they saw a homeless man (a comparative rarity in Toronto). He realised that the homeless man had already worked out what the best location for charitable contributions was. In this case, it was at a point next to a subway entrance and a Starbucks. He convinced his team that they could set up their own stand right there. Two things could happen, he explained to me. One is that the homeless man, moved away to come back another day. The other was that the homeless man stayed in which case he believed that his team would have edge in their claim as their cause was for other people and his was just for himself. In the end, the homeless man abandoned the post.

Perhaps we shouldn't be so surprised though.  It's not like the demand for stories is going to disappear anytime soon.

H/T Calbuzz

In the past, someone with a new idea would have had to actually build the thing themselves, find a market for it and figure out how to get it mass-produced. Now inexpensive technology means that anybody can quickly transform an idea into a physical product. Google SketchUp makes it easy for even the sloppiest untrained draftsperson to mock up a 3-D digital model. Any inventor can contact a Chinese factory, many of which are so hungry for American business that they will create a prototype for next to nothing. Sites like Etsy.com make it easier to reach a market, and others, like Quirky.com, allow users to simply suggest an idea and share the royalties if it makes it to the market.

This environment approaches the ideal economy that Adam Smith wrote about — one in which size and power don’t always beat good ideas in the market. 

  File as another data point supporting the hypothesis that the 90's techno-visionaries are slowly but surely being proven right.

  Yet our institutions -- notably patent law -- have decidedly not kept pace:

These days, the average costs for a patent are about $10,000 — chump change for a corporation, but a considerable amount for many home inventors.

  Even with pro-bono legal shops set up to help would be inventors, the odds are still stacked against our intrepid innovators in favor of big capital:

It costs around $1 million to defend a patent-infringement lawsuit, Romer says. So even if a lone inventor has a legitimate patent claim, a large company can sue and force the person into bankruptcy. 

Anyone else down for a New Nationalism?

Cheers,

Stag Staff

As of this winter, the centre had about 60 PhD students, of whom 80 per cent were men. Virtually all hailed from such forbiddingly numerate subjects as electrical engineering, computational statistics, pure mathematics and artificial intelligence. These realms of knowledge contain concepts such as data mining, non-linear dynamics and chaos theory that make many of us nervous just to see written down. Philip Treleaven, the centre’s director, is delighted by this. “Bright buggers,” he calls his students. “They want to do great things.”

...

Deciphering such patterns is what excites collaborators with the Financial Computing Centre who are more interested in stabilising the markets than beating them. Zheludev’s supervisor is David Tuckett, a psychoanalyst at UCL who studies the interplay of emotion and the unconscious in trading decisions. He told me that the database could, if used properly, allow us to see our exaggerated hopes and paranoias for what they are, before they grow to overwhelm us. “If you think about it like the sea,” said Tuckett, of the torrents of digital information that we produce each day, “can we identify narratives when they are not yet at the surface? Can we learn about how they come and go?”

As Tuckett spoke, I began to believe in the idea of quants enabling us to digest the world in more rational ways, to become, in a sense, better versions of ourselves. “We are not interested in a world that is completely without excitement or volatility,” said Tuckett, “But we are interested in getting a handle on things before they get out of hand.” The paradox is that in order to become safer, in order to become better informed, we will have to continue to place ever more faith in brains and machines that we only begin to understand. It is always easy to start. The problem is knowing when to stop.

#LearnMath

H/T Tyler Cowen