Some economics related links

Justin Fox in Wresting the Economic Debate Away from the Economists responding to
The Return of History by David Brooks:
"...about why economists had gained so much influence over the past half century and historians had lost so much.

One answer I offered was that economists had managed a remarkable balancing act between making the guts of their work totally incomprehensible — and thus forbiddingly impressive — to the outside world while continuing to offer reasonably straightforward conclusions. The basic form of an academic economics paper is a couple of comprehensible paragraphs at the beginning and a couple of comprehensible paragraphs at the end, with a bunch of really-hard-to-follow math or statistical analysis in the middle. An academic history paper, on the other hand, is often an uninterrupted cascade of semi-comprehensible jargon that neither impresses a lay reader nor offers any clear conclusions.
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Why does any of this matter? Mainly because the ways in which scholars interpret the world can (with a time lag and a lot lost in translation) have a big influence on the way the rest of us see things. Over the past half century, economists have come to utterly dominate thinking about economic matters, and begun to insinuate themselves into lots of other fields too. Business education, and business advice, has certainly become much more economics-oriented. Which isn't all bad. But even an economist would agree that we could use more competition in the marketplace of ideas. Right?"
Felix Salmon comments on Justin Fox post in Economics without mathematics with many interesting comments and links like Robert Waldman's comment:
"Often the plain English parts of papers exclusively reflect the preferences of the author(s) and are unrelated to the evidence or mathematics in the paper."

From The IMF's new wisdom:
"Most bad policies result from either the power of special interests or ideologically driven mistakes. The fund appears to be gradually rethinking some of its ideologically driven mistakes, which is a good thing for the institution – and because it is influential, for the world. But the problem is that it is still run by "special interests""