Economics

Stack Exchange

13:11

Stack Overflow Blog: Welcome Valued Associate Peter Grace!

Posted by Alison Sperling on October 18th, 2011

Peter Grace joins Stack Exchange as Sysadmin in the NYC Headquarters, expanding the System Administration team to 3 people. George, Kyle and Pete are working hard to make sure our growing sites continue to make the internet a better place.

Pete has been married to his lovely wife Kristy for eight years and they have two sons Nate, 3 and Ben, 1. An avid gardener, Pete has successfully grown pumpkins, radishes, cucumbers, swiss chard, snow peas and more. In his spare time, Pete enjoys playing computer games and guns with George. …

Tal Fishman

15:02

@AarthiDevanathan any word from officialdom on whether we really are opening to the public today? I think the site is not quite ready, IMHO.

@EnergyNumbers may be hard for now, but it is absolutely what I think the site should strive for. At the very least, just having many of these truly expert hard questions on the site could discourage some wannabes from posting their econ 101 type questions.

EnergyNumbers

@TalFishman Oh I agree: I think that the questions we have to date don't give a great impression.

Of course, it may well be the case that a longer private beta wouldn't improve matters much - maybe a public beta will work better, as long as we move to close / delete bad questions quickly.

I expect that the experience of StackExchange staff, who've done this plenty of times before, will be helpful. They've seen better, and worse, private betas than this, I guess. I guess we'll be hearing soon, what they've decided.

Tal Fishman

@EnergyNumbers Sometimes it is hard to find questions worth closing at a glance. Make sure to down-vote as well so others can see it is low quality.

EnergyNumbers

Given Area51 says we go live in 3 hours (18.00 GMT), I guess we go live in 3 hours!

Tal Fishman

@EnergyNumbers Not necessarily, I don't think it is automatic like that, but perhaps someone will come and tell us.

@EnergyNumbers pro tem moderators with ability to close in a single vote may also help with this.

EnergyNumbers

@TalFishman I have been trying to do that.

@TalFishman Yes, I expect some laying down of the law, pretty firmly, once they're in place!

Tal Fishman

15:15

@EnergyNumbers and for future chat visitors, use the following page as a guide:

economics.stackexchange.com/questions?page=6&sort=votes

I just went in and voted to close a bunch of questions, got a bunch from 3 to 4 votes, still need one more.

Tal Fishman

15:32

@EnergyNumbers too many of the answers (yours and mine) to meta.economics.stackexchange.com/q/1/89 discuss whether X is on or off-topic. Perhaps we should delete our posts and re-post them individually in new meta post devoted to determining whether a given topic is in scope.

Aarthi Devanathan Ψ

15:55

@EnergyNumbers @TalFishman Yes, our private beta is extended. :)

2

EnergyNumbers

@AarthiDevanathanΨ OK, thanks for letting us know.

@TalFishman I thought that was the idea in that question: each X gets posted as an answer, then the community can vote up if they agree with the on/off topic assignment in the answer, or down if they disagree.

Aarthi Devanathan Ψ

@EnergyNumbers Yeah we're in private for another week to rustle up some more questions and internal traffic. Email all your econ professor and grad student friends! :D :D

EnergyNumbers

@TalFishman done - I'd already downvoted / voted to close most of those, so haven't been able to add the clinching close vote to any yet, I'm afraid.

@AarthiDevanathanΨ remind me again of the commission we earn for that ;-)

Aarthi Devanathan Ψ

@EnergyNumbers My love and admiration, of course :D :D

Stack Exchange

16:12

0

Q: Is history of the world economy in scope?

Do questions relating to history of the world economy (as opposed to history of economic thought) belong on this site, or would they be better served on History Stack Exchange?

0

Q: How to handle questions about data?

So far we have [one data source question] which seems to have garnered some pretty good answers and could potentially serve as a valuable community resources. However, I think we need to lay out now our policy regarding future questions about data sources. I believe data sources questions shoul...

discussion scope exact-duplicates

Aarthi Devanathan Ψ

ps: i'm going to ask a few econometric questions soon. you guys are gonna LOVE me.

/was an econ major

/still got questions from my last semester

/finished in May so it's all still fresh in my mind

EnergyNumbers

@AarthiDevanathanΨ What - no reception on the town hall balcony? No open-top bus ride? No stock in StackExchange? Oh well. I might send invites to the handful of economists around me anyway, but the students here don't need any more distractions.

Tal Fishman

@EnergyNumbers Encourage people to ask questions they are genuinely interested in, then it is not a "distraction" but a helpful web site that can enrich their learning experience.

@EnergyNumbers I thought the idea was to set a text. Besides, it can be difficult to debate topics with responses to an answer.

EnergyNumbers

16:27

@StackExchange @TalFishman - I just did a quick edit on this to fix the link in the opening sentence. Hope that's ok

Tal Fishman

@EnergyNumbers Yeah, np, thanks.

Stack Exchange

18:51

0

Q: Web-based currency questions

A very small number of questions relating to web-based and video-game currencies have appeared (here, here) and there has been some discussion (here) about them. I would like to know if people think that these questions, even if loosely based on Economics, detract from the site. They will certai...

discussion

Tal Fishman

@StackExchange I have a feeling gold bug questions will be plaguing this site for a long time to come.

They have been quite annoying and neurotic on money.SE

EnergyNumbers

20:21

@TalFishman ah yes, I see what you mean - about 40 questions tagged gold already.

Heh, maybe that means we could classify all gold questions as off-topic for here.

Tal Fishman

20:46

@EnergyNumbers You mean b/c they're on topic at money.SE? Not likely, since some gold questions on money.SE actually get closed b/c they are too much about economics and not about personal finance.

EnergyNumbers

@TalFishman Oh well. I didn't think I'd get away with it, but worth a shot ;-)

Tal Fishman

@EnergyNumbers Nevertheless, I believe 90% of such gold questions are off-topic here, too, at least during the beta stage when questions are supposed to be "expert."

EnergyNumbers

21:29

Ooh, hello @JasonB , and welcome - I've really enjoyed your contributions to the site

Jason B

21:50

Thanks @EnergyNumbers, likewise. This site could shape up to be a good bit of fun.

I'm really not used to talking (or reading) about economics in "short answer format." Hour- (or evening-) long conversations are more normal. Maybe with some practice I'll learn to get to the point (would be a good skill for our entire profession).

Tal Fishman

@JasonB in light of your answer re: economics of SE, why do you participate on economics.SE?

Jason B

@TalFishman :-) Honestly, not sure. There is just something attractive and refreshing about the format. I'd go with leisure/learning with a bit of productive procrastination thrown in.

@TalFishman & you? I see you are a primarily a quant?

Tal Fishman

22:06

@JasonB Yeah, I'm a quant, but I am formally trained in economics, so perhaps eventually my activity on this site may rival my activity on quant.SE.

Although I haven't really found any great questions I feel I can answer, perhaps because I only deal with a very narrow bit of economics these days.

Jason B

@TalFishman Good -- it looks like a bit more quantitative horsepower is needed around here. I keep wanting to answer the econometrics questions, but feel like surely someone else would be better.

Tal Fishman

@JasonB In any case, definitely a large measure of leisure and procrastination. I try to justify it to myself as learning, and I definitely have learned a lot from SE sites. I also find the system of offering bounties for my own questions that are truly important to be useful, and you can only do that if you have some reputation to spare.

@JasonB I think many econometrics questions would be better suited to stats.SE.

EnergyNumbers

@TalFishman oof, careful there - I tried that line, and think I annoyed some people in doing it. Maybe that was just my winning manner, though.

Tal Fishman

@JasonB I also think that questions from high-rep users get relatively more attention from the other knowledgeable people on the site, so they tend to get better answers.

Jason B

@TalFishman @EnergyNumbers I tend to agree that the purely statistical econometrics questions would be better on stats.SE. I've not seen any purely micro/macro-econometrics questions so far (which might be a better fit here).

Tal Fishman

22:14

@EnergyNumbers Who was annoyed? I think you were right, overall, although I can understand mpiktas's point that the questions should stay here for now, particularly if they are very closely tied to economics, although eventually (in a few months) we should politely recommend to the poster that he ask on stats.SE and close the question here.

@JasonB have you voted to close some of the questions here?

EnergyNumbers

@TalFishman I don't remember who - I just remember coming away with a vibe of "oh, that didn't go well" ... and I notice that we have several stats questions going unanswered ...

Jason B

@TalFishman - yes, a couple. Shall I give them another look?

Tal Fishman

@JasonB Please do, there are a bunch that deserve to be closed but have 4/5 close votes.

@EnergyNumbers Yeah, I often feel that way when just 1 or 2 users down-vote me or write something negative (on meta). But keep in mind that (a) meta does not affect reputation and (b) there may be a large number of silent users agreeing with you who feel no need to chime in because you've pretty much summed up their views.

Jason B

Ok, it looks like all but two of the questions with negative net votes are now closed. I don't think the student loan question is so awful, and I'd tried to edit the question about "banks printing money" so that it at least has a neutral POV and no false claims.

Tal Fishman

22:29

Just answered the following question:

7

Q: Are there any valuation models of securities that use hyperbolic discounting?

To quote Wikipedia: In hyperbolic discounting, valuations fall very rapidly for small delay periods, but then fall slowly for longer delay periods. This contrasts with exponential discounting, in which valuation falls by a constant factor per unit delay, regardless of the total length of the ...

security-analysis hyperbolic-discounting

but really all I did is a simple google search and a paper answering exactly this question came up, so now I am thinking this was not a great question to begin with. What do other ppl think about easily google-able questions that sound smart and sophisticated, (especially, @EnergyNumbers, since you contributed your own answer)?

EnergyNumbers

22:44

@TalFishman Oh, I just tried to give an answer based on how I'd try to model it. Nice find on that paper. I think it's better than an Econ101 question (though I see it was actually asked by an 18 year old), and I think it works on the site. Maybe the OP will feel a bit awkward that they didn't find it themselves with a web search.

Actually, maybe I should go do a couple of extra web searches on the unanswered questions I've posted. Just to be sure, like.

2

Transcript for