The Fall and Rise of Development Economics

Continuing my search for an answer to the question of whether mathematics is essential to economics, I've just finished reading Paul Krugman's 1994 article titled "The Fall and Rise of Development Economics", which brought tears to my eyes. If only someone had brought this article to my attention years ago.

Maths are for Dummies

I am still in the process of being convinced that maths are useful in economics generally, and law and economics in particular. I am also opened to be convinced the other way round.

So far, I have found the article by Hans Brems published in the Journal of Law and Economics in 1975 titled "Marshall on Mathematics" to be an interesting read.

A few months ago, Dani Rodrik has also discussed the question on his blog on why economists use maths:

So I tell them a story about Sir W. Arthur Lewis. When I was a master's student myself at Princeton, I once attended a lecture that he gave on real wages, the commodity terms of trade, and North-South income differentials. The talk had no math in it. One of the younger faculty members of the economics department was sitting in the front row, and I could see him scratching his head in confusion throughout the talk. A few minutes after Sir Arthur was done, this young professor jumped up in excitement and went up to the board. "Now I get it!" he exclaimed and began to scribble some equations on the board. "This is the equation which relates to what you said in the first part of your talk, and this one expresses the other, and here is a third... and now finally we have three independent equations that determines your three endogenous variables..." Sir Arthur kept on his bemused smile as his lecture was explained to him in mathematical terms.

The moral of the story is that if you are smart enough to be a Nobel-prize winning economist maybe you can do without the math, but the rest of us mere mortals cannot. We need the math to make sure that we think straight--to ensure that our conclusions follow from our premises and that we haven't left loose ends hanging in our argument.

In other words, we use math not because we are smart, but because we are not smart enough.

We are just smart enough to recognize that we are not smart enough. And this recognition, I tell our students, will set them apart from a lot of people out there with very strong opinions about what to do about poverty and underdevelopment.

It says, I might just be one of the dummies.

Students Learn Better When The Numbers Don't Talk And Dance

Found this rather old entry on ScienceDaily.

"Researchers found that when college students were taught an artificial form of mathematics and physics, they learned it better when it was presented using simple, abstract symbols ... rather than more visually engaging and concrete 3-D objects that moved dynamically on a computer screen."

This finding seems to support the idea that it is more effective to teach law and economics using abstract mathematical concepts than 'talking' about some intuitive economic concepts with minimal math.

What constitutes good legal scholarship?

Harvard Law School's professor Daryl Levinson give advice to aspiring law professors among his students. Some of my favourite quotes are:

• ... what exactly law professors do: "Scholarship and teaching, in that order."
• Q: What constitutes good legal scholarship?
  A: Legal scholarship is very heterogeneous. There is less doctrinal scholarship these days, although there is still a fair amount of it. Increasingly there are policy papers and interdisciplinary papers. The tools that students are formally taught in law school tend to be inadequate, since students basically just learn case analysis. You likely need to do more than that, but you can only get a sense of what "that" is by reading scholarship. Most would say your best bet is to be interdisciplinary.
• ... practical legal experience is not a good predictor of scholarly ability,
  and, ... "is pretty nearly disqualifying."
• Approximately twenty-five percent of entry-level professors hired last year had Ph.D.'s ... [Blogger's note: There's no Ph.D. programme in law in the US, which means that all these Ph.D.'s are likely to be in fields other than law.]
  

Read more here.

A few basic tips on studying mathematics

I thought I would share these useful tips on studying mathematics which I found on another blog.

CBSE Papers : Few basic tips to study mathematics

1. Ask questions if you are unsure about the formulas and don’t be ashamed, many people may have some type of difficulty when it comes to math.

2. Study each formula carefully, in order words spend twice the amount of time studying and learning math equations from the time you are in class. Ex: if your class meets for one hour spend two hours away from class studying time on math problems. This does not mean you have to spend two solid hours studying, break your time up in 30 minute intervals.

3. If there is someone else in the class who has a better understanding of the content get with them for one on one tutoring or a small study group. This seems to help a lot when your peers tutor you and it may be fun. Keep your group around 4 to 5 members and do this early on if problems start to arise, smaller groups seem to get more done.

4. Always, always let your instructor or teacher know you are having problems. This will allow you some leverage that they are aware of any problems you may be having and may devote some additional help or sources of help to assist you.

5. You may want to study each theory or formula with a friend by conversing what you have learned with them. I found this to be very helpful.

6. Write down notes as the problems are being explained. And always try taking courses in sequential order if you can. For example take pre-algebra before algebra and algebra I before algebra II and trigonometry, well you get it.

Statistics Helpdesk

My soon-to-be colleague Lindsay Stirton points out to me an innovative and potentially useful service funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). It is a free statistics helpdeak provided by the Department of Mathematics and Statistics of the Lancaster University. UK academics could register themselves to obtain "help and guidance on statistical matters, including questionnaire design, statistical analysis of data, use of statistical packages, design of experiments and data display." More information can be found here. Lindsay tells me that over at the University of East Anglia, a similar walk-up service is also available to staff and students.

YouTube University

Techdirt is running an interesting article and links to more interesting articles on open courseware and free video lectures on the Internet. Personally I have always been a big fan of lifelong learning and find that some of these video lectures to be particularly useful for picking new knowledge on the side without having to be there at MIT or UC Berkeley or Carnegie Mellon. In fact there are databases of more of these: Online Education Database and OER Commons. Legal scholars trying to pick up statistical skills might find something useful there.

Call for Papers: SLSA 2008 Conference: Maths, Statistics and Scientific Legal Methodologies stream

The University of Manchester will be organising the Socio-Legal Studies Association annual conference next year from 18 to 20 March 2008. A preliminar call for papers is up right now. I have volunteered to organise a stream titled "Maths, Statistics and Scientific Legal Methodologies". This is meant to be a forum for discussion on how maths and statistics can be incorporated into a scientific way of legal research. At the same time, our head of the law school, Professor Frank Stephen is organising the Law and Economics stream. We welcome early expressions of interest for presenting a paper. For further information, please visit the website at http://www.law.manchester.ac.uk/aboutus/news/events/SLSA2008/conveners.html. Kindly spread the word around.

Advice for Erwin Chemerinsky

Earlier last month, I submitted my entry to Paul Caron and Bill Henderson call's for advice in response for advice for Erwin Chemirinsky who is going to be the founding dean of the new law school at UC Irvine. I wrote:

I would like to see a law school promote scientific methodology in legal research. In Chemerinsky's case, that would mean that he plans towards offering a doctoral programme in scientific legal research in a couple of years' time. His hiring policy will have to reflect this aim, by hiring less faculty who do traditional ("black letter law") legal research and more faculty who have interest and training in scientific methods such as political science, economics, mathematics, and statistics. It is also time to bring law and economics out of the domain of economics and firmly implant it as part of the methodology of legal research, like what happened to political science in the 1970s and later. All law schools have as their main aim the training of lawyers. What will be truly innovative is a law school that trains legal policy makers.

Looking at all the entries, it seems like only mine concerns with a doctoral programme. All the others are about enhancing the traditional (what we in the UK call undergraduate) law programme.

Professor of Empirical Legal Studies at the University of Amsterdam

I saw this at the ELS blog. It's nice to know that the Amsterdam Center is doing all those things that I think should be done, such as a doctoral programme which includes a two-year economics training at the Tinbergen Institute, and now a chair in ELS. Way to good, Amsterdam!

Professor of Empirical Legal Studies at the University of Amsterdam

The Amsterdam Center for Law & Economics (ACLE) at the University of Amsterdam

The Amsterdam Center for Law & Economics (www.acle.nl), is a joint initiative of the economics and law faculties of the University of Amsterdam. The objective of the ACLE is to promote high-quality research in the fields at the interface of law and economics. Located in the heart of Amsterdam’s old city, the ACLE presently associates around twenty scholars in both disciplines, ranging from full professor to PhD students. The Center's main focus areas are: Competition & Regulation, Corporate Governance & Law, and Foundations of Law & Economics.

Vacancy for the position of (Full) Professor of Empirical Legal Studies (1,0 Fte)

The purpose of the Chair is to strengthen empirical research in law and economics, and particularly the application of legal analysis, statistical inference and economic modeling to fundamental areas of national and international law ranging from tort liability, property and intellectual property, contracts, criminal law, to law enforcement and litigation.

The prospective Chair-holder should be an established researcher with international standing reflected in high-level publications in top law & economics journals. We envision a researcher that has a rigorous knowledge of relevant fields of law combined with econometrical and statistical skills. The principal tasks are active engagement in research, teaching and course development, and the supervision of PhD students and post docs.

The Chair in empirical legal studies is a full time tenured position in the Amsterdam Center for Law & Economics (ACLE). The formal appointment of the Chair will be within the Faculty of Law.

While a senior position is available, the position could also be filled at a more junior level, i.e. a tenure-track appointment that could mature over time to a full professor.

Further information

For further information, please contact Prof. Arnoud Boot (A.W.A.Boot@uva.nl, +31 20 525 4162) or Dr. Giuseppe Dari-Mattiacci (gdarimat@uva.nl, +31 (0) 20 525 7157).

A further description and instructions on how to apply are available on www.english.uva.nl/vacancies. The deadline for application is 15 December 2007.

Princeton Companion to Mathematics

Being trained as a librarian, I am a sucker for reference works. So it looks like I'm going to cough up some more money for the forthcoming Princeton Companion to Mathematics. Within my limited ability, the sample chapters seem to be quite readable. I'm certainly going to add this 1000-page odd tome to my shelf. Go here for instructions on how to get access to the sample chapters.

CFP: 17th Silvaplana Workshop on Political Economy, Switzerland, 2008

Call for Papers

The 17th Silvaplana Workshop on Political Economy will be held on 23-27 July 2008. A call for papers is currently underway. Further information is found here.

CFP: European Public Choice Society annual meeting 2008, Jena, Germany

Call for Papers

The European Public Choice Society will be holding their annual meeting for 2008 in Jena, Germany from 27-30 March 2008. Further information on submitting a paper is available here.

Math Geeks in Law

Although I can't profess to be a math wizard, I do like maths since young. To foster a closer ties among like-minded math aficionados in law, I have set up a Math Geeks in Law group in Facebook. The direct like to the group's homepage is here. But you'll have to first be a Facebook member before you can join.

No Two Standards

I have come to believe that, much as we legal scholars would like to object to, there are no two standards to law and economics scholarship. By this I mean that journal editors and referees will use the same standard for evaluating a piece of work irrespective of whether the author was trained in economics or in law.

If this 'no two standards' hypothesis holds true, then it would greatly disadvantage scholars trained in law, unless they too have undergone the necessary training in economics. Increasingly law and economics scholarship means either proof by way of mathematical modelling or hypothesis testing by empirical methods. A law and economics scholar nowadays will have to use either maths or statistics. The probability that a purely descriptive work being accepted for publication is fairly slim. Unless, of course, the author is already well-known in the law and economics circle.