One of the first questions that came up in the New Year was about traffic rules. Why do cars in some countries drive on the left and in others on the right side of the road?
Well, I knew that left-side driving was the older standard, going back to the Roman Empire. So the question was actually 'Why did most countries switch from left to right?'.
Fortunately, Wikipedia has the answer: "In the late 18th century, the shift from left to right that took place in countries such as the United States was based on teamsters’ use of large freight wagons pulled by several pairs of horses. The wagons had no driver's seat, so a postilion sat on the left rear horse and held his whip in his right hand. Seated on the left, the driver preferred that other wagons pass him on the left so that he could be sure to keep clear of the wheels of oncoming wagons. He did that by driving on the right side of the road."
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One question was left over from the Old Year. How popular is Paul Krugman compared to other economists, e.g. Greg Mankiw? Unfortunately, I still don't have a good answer.
If I search for "Paul Krugman" on Google I get currently 2.2M hits. If I search for "Greg Mankiw" on Google I get 0.5M. This would suggest that P.K. is more popular by a factor of 4. (However, this is different by a more than a factor of 3 from what I saw just two days earlier, when it was 7.5M to 0.5M).
If I do the same search on bing.com I get only 700k for P.K. and 250k for G.M., suggesting a factor of 3 between the two.
So this would suggest that P.K. is more popular by a factor 3 - 4 than G.M.
However, if I use alexa.com to check the popularity of their blogs I get 441k sites linking to P.K. and only 3.6k linking to G.M. - which would suggest a difference by a factor of more than 100!
So I am afraid my project is already stuck in some nasty details on how to determine e.g. the popularity of economists...
Happy New Year everybody!
4 comments:
Happy New Year Wolfgang. Hope this is a good year for you and your family.
Thank you!
I wish you and your family the best as well.
Happy New Year!
A couple more data points top economists
More
<a href="http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2011/02/economics&>and more</a>
From the last:
<i>To get a sense of current economist opinion, we turned to the experts at Economics by invitation. We asked them which economists were most influential over the past decade. And we asked them to give their thoughts on which economists were doing most to shape post-crisis thinking.
Many of the respondents submitted detailed explanations with their answers. Click here to see their contributions. I was struck by a few common themes—the idea that humility and a generalist approach to economics have been rewarded, the continued influence of the profession's founding fathers, and the sense that post-crisis economics is a wide-open place. Do read all the contributions.
But we also tallied the nominations for most influential, and the results are interesting. Asked which economist was most influential over the past decade, the network resoundingly answered, with seven individual nominations: Ben Bernanke. John Maynard Keynes was next, with four. Jeff Sachs, Hyman Minsky, and Paul Krugman followed with three, and Adam Smith, Robert Lucas, Joseph Sitglitz, Friedrich Hayek, and Alan Greenspan each had two. There were 26 other economists with a single nomination each*.</i>
CIP,
thank you for the links.
Paul Krugman and Robert Lucas, Joseph Stiglitz and Friedrich Hayek.
There you have clarity 8-)
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