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Re:Economics Nobel laureate Paul Romer is a Python programmi... by TorKlingberg on Tuesday October 09, 2018 @05:02AM (#18174333)
I'm surprised there seems to be have been no HN discussion on this years Economics prize. Or are my HS search skills lacking?
Re:Economics Nobel laureate Paul Romer is a Python programmi... by daxat_staglatz on Tuesday October 09, 2018 @05:50AM (#18174534)
I haven't found any, either.

This is a shame because economics is already a computational discipline and increasingly so. It can be of interest to the HN crowd.

There is an awful lot of programming done by people that are not professional programmers. As an economist myself, I think code have become so central to our profession that we can no longer afford to ignore software engineering best practices. Conversely, there may be quite a few topics in computational economics that interest programmers.

For instance, an awful lot of macroeconomics - including to an extent Romer's sub-field, endogenous growth theory - is essentially programming in Dynare [0] and doing computer simulations.

Nordhaus got the prize for developing (quite basic, actually) simulation models that integrate the economic systems and environmental systems. See for instance there [1].

Micro-simulation is of course a big area where programming and economics meet - you can follow development on github [2, 3]. This is code that has an enormous impact on society, as it is used as a basis to evaluate the effects of policies.

Econometrics, aka statistics for economics, is also a big area where programmers could contribute to economic research. There is a big push to adapt ML techniques to solve economists' problems, eg Athey's research [4].

[0] http://www.dynare.org/

[1] https://sites.google.com/site/williamdnordhaus/dice-rice

[2] https://github.com/openfisca

[3] https://github.com/InseeFr/Destinie-2

[4] https://arxiv.org/abs/1510.04342

Re:Economics Nobel laureate Paul Romer is a Python programmi... by nl on Tuesday October 09, 2018 @07:31AM (#18174994)
This is a great comment.

I believe the NY Fed has open source economic models in Julia, too.

Re:Economics Nobel laureate Paul Romer is a Python programmi... by daxat_staglatz on Tuesday October 09, 2018 @07:48AM (#18175084)
Re:Economics Nobel laureate Paul Romer is a Python programmi... by dhimes on Tuesday October 09, 2018 @08:32AM (#18175351)
Maybe part of the problem is that unless you delve beyond layman level (and maybe even if you do?) economics is close-coupled to political views, and those start wars- so we tend to steer clear on this board.
Re:Economics Nobel laureate Paul Romer is a Python programmi... by cirgue on Tuesday October 09, 2018 @10:44AM (#18176353)
The dismal science has earned the name many times over: no one wants to read a long-winded epistle on the relationship between bond yields and non-farm employment in Alabama between 1993 and 1998, and that's where a lot of the interesting parts of econ lie.
Re:Economics Nobel laureate Paul Romer is a Python programmi... by rchaud on Tuesday October 09, 2018 @10:44AM (#18176356)
Likely because there aren't too many Economics majors on this forum (I am, BTW). From what I've seen on previous HN posts on economics topics, the discussion veers towards "Economics isn't a real science" variety, with the majority of the posts going back on forth on that comment, rather than the actual topic of the article.