ARNOLD KLING
August 14, 2011
The Top Political Contributors
August 11, 2011
Gender and the New Commanding Heights
August 11, 2011
Jamie Galbraith Makes an Assumption
August 11, 2011
Macroeconometrics: The Science of Hubris
August 10, 2011
Real and Nominal Bond Yields
BRYAN CAPLAN
August 14, 2011
The Effect of Thumb Sucking on Income
August 12, 2011
The Voice of Cold, Hard Truth to All Would-Be Educators
August 12, 2011
Ability, Morality, and Prosperity: A Paper and a Report
August 11, 2011
The Theory of Time and Frittering
August 10, 2011
Male Variance and the Remnants of the Gender Gap
DAVID HENDERSON
August 9, 2011
Hayek in "Unbroken", Part Two
August 8, 2011
Hayek in "Unbroken"
August 5, 2011
James Bovard on the Peace Corps
August 4, 2011
Summers Way Off on FDR and 1941
August 3, 2011
The "Amazon" Tax
SHARE
As funny as all these are, I have to nominate Jay Pil Choi's paper "Up or Down? A Male Economist's Manifesto on the Toilet Seat Etiquette" (2002). There's a follow up by Hammad Siddiqi that takes a game-theoretic approach. Do not miss. Print these out and put them in your bathroom for fine reading. I did so, and have gotten many laughs, and upped my nerd cred significantly.
None of this is even half as witty as Axel Leijonhufvud's “Life Among the Econ”, originally published in Western Economic Journal in 1973 and reprinted in his book Information and Coordination: essays in Macroeconomic Theory (1981).
My geography teacher at school was very fond of Japan but I suspect that it was because she liked to refer to the "hairy Ainu".
I'm a big fan of Siegfried's A First Lesson in Econometrics, JPE, 1970.
I don't have the link handy, but Krugman's piece on time travel economics was pretty clever. (Tyler Cowen linked to it right after Krugman won the Nobel, I believe.)
Oops I think I got Krugman's idea confused with a Glenn Whitman paper. Krugman's (funny) paper involved interstellar commerce and special relativity. Good nerd yucks for sure.
Alan Blinder is funny when he tries to argue that the US economy in the 1980s wasn't going through a period of expansion (his main reasons are that he's a Democrat and he hates Reagan).
Krugman is funniest when he begins an op-ed column with a distortion, half-truth, or lie, and then expounds from that. Wait a second......
Actually, Thomas Sowell is the only economist to actually make me laugh til it hurt, and it's only been on a few occasions. His writing is very interesting, but it's VERY dry and unemotional for the most part, so when he lets loose with a very dry joke from out of nowhere, it hits you hard.
I will stop disparaging the contributions of economists to the advancement of humanity . . . for at east 5 hours. =)
Seriously good times, folks. Thank you.
The midi files with the music for "I Am the Very Model of a Post-Economics-General" and "When I Was An Undergrad I Served a Term" are not available through those links!