Top all-time · #1179
Paul Romer
Personal blog · paulromer.neteconomicsscience
Paul Romer's personal blog at paulromer.net covers economics and science. Since 2015, 58 different Hacker News readers have linked it 74 times, most often “The Trouble with Macroeconomics (2016) [pdf]”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-09-13, and you can follow it by feed.
Rarely recommended · 3 of 31 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Paul Romer's blog for his critiques of macroeconomics (the identifiability problem and 'mathiness'), and for posts on Python, Jupyter and Mathematica tooling.
- Recommended for · 3 comments
- Called a "good read" (Mathematica/Jupyter post), a "great paper" on macro identifiability, and a "well regarded" paper on macro modelling.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 31 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Economist. Policy Entrepreneur. Geek. Co-recipient of the 2018 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel. University Professor at NYU. Focused on urbanization; cooperation at scale of millions and billions; science; technology; economic development; long-term growth; cod
Most-linked posts?
- The Trouble with Macroeconomics (2016) [pdf]12 people · 13 mentions · first linked 2016-09-14
- Jupyter, Mathematica, and the Future of the Research Paper8 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2018-04-15
- The Trouble with Macroeconomics (2016) [pdf]3 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2019-12-07
- The FDA's perpetual process machine2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2020-06-27
- What It Takes to Be a Leader in Both Basic Science and Technological Progress2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2020-07-08
- Mathiness in the Theory of Economic Growth (2015)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2017-07-26
- Escaping from Anaconda's Stranglehold on macOS2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2024-08-28
- /stigler-conviction-vs-feynman-integrity/2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2015-08-04
- Looting, Silicon Valley Edition2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2023-03-22
What Hacker News says?
Economics is in worse shape in some regards. Nobel prize winner Paul Romer has called out most macroeconomics as being completely detached from reality because economic concepts and conditions that are talked about in scholarly papers cannot be identified in the real world by any method. [1] [1] https://paulromer.net/trouble-with-macroeconomics-update/ind...
Comment linking /trouble-with-macroeconomics-update/index.html
on “Psychology’s Replication Crisis Is Real”Submitted Jupyter, Mathematica, and the Future of the Research Paper as a story · 321 points
HN discussionA different framing of this is that politics is, more and more, intruding into science. Paul Romer: > Politics does not lead to a broadly shared consensus. It has to yield a decision whether or not a consensus prevails. As a result, political institutions create incentives for participants to exaggerate disagreements between factions. Words that are evocative and ambiguous better serve factional interests than words…
Comment linking /mathiness/Mathiness.pdf
on “We're Incentivizing Bad Science”Submitted Escaping from Anaconda's Stranglehold on macOS as a story · 143 points
HN discussionPaul Romer of the New York Stern School of Business has talked about the crisis of identifiability[1] which makes most macroeconomics non-falsifiable and completely isolates economists from ever being wrong in their theories. He's likened this to the crisis with string theory in physics. [1] https://paulromer.net/the-trouble-with-macro/WP-Trouble.pdf
Comment linking /the-trouble-with-macro/WP-Trouble.pdf
on “Amid cuts to basic research, New Zealand scraps all support for social sciences”Submitted The FDA's perpetual process machine as a story · 125 points
HN discussionWait, but this is exactly what modern macroeconomics does by making a huge leap from microeconomic fundamentals and aggregating this into the Solow, Romer growth models and many derived upon models. It got so crazy that Paul Romer critices this approach himself in a well regarded paper last year: https://paulromer.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/WP-Trouble.... The austrian economists in turn don't pretend to know tha…
Comment linking /wp-content/uploads/2016/09/WP-Trouble.pdf
on “How economists rode maths to become our era’s astrologers”Submitted Feynman's concept of scientific integrity as a story · 73 points
HN discussionNoah Smith tries to describe the overall state of macro in this recent post: https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-01-11/tribal-wa... He starts out strong and gives a good overview of the "schools" that have been laid to rest, but concludes on some kind of utopian, happy note that I don't believe he has any evidence to support. But then again he spends most of his time in conversation with leading economists…
Comment linking /wp-content/uploads/2016/09/WP-Trouble.pdf
on “Physicists taking jobs as Silicon Valley software engineers”Submitted The Trouble with Macroeconomics (2016) [pdf] as a story · 58 points
HN discussionI'd like to tie your comment to an article that was linked to here the other day. It was to a paper by the economist Paul Romer on `mathiness'[0]. It is interesting to me that the standard bearers for progress and achievement (you and others select) are either mathematicians and/or physicists. Why physicists over any other natural scientist? Perhaps because physics is math-heavy and reliant on mathematical domain mo…
Comment linking /mathiness/
on “Betty Shannon, Unsung Mathematical Genius”Submitted Why Information Grows as a story · 53 points
HN discussionDoes anyone have any insight into why Paul Romer is a Julia skeptic? In the blog post https://paulromer.net/jupyter-mathematica-and-the-future-of-... he says: "Which reminds me. If you are a Julia enthusiast, how do you suppose the investors in this new language plan to make their big score?" Also there's this: https://twitter.com/paulmromer/status/985507319114096640 It doesn't seem like he's followed up on his thre…
Comment linking /jupyter-mathematica-and-the-future-of-the-research-paper/
on “Economics Nobel laureate Paul Romer is a Python programming convert”Submitted Base-Rate Blindness as a story · 37 points
HN discussionPaul Romer on Mathematica is a good read. https://paulromer.net/jupyter-mathematica-and-the-future-of-...
Comment linking /jupyter-mathematica-and-the-future-of-the-research-paper/
on “Launching Version 13.1 of Wolfram Language and Mathematica”Submitted Mathiness in the Theory of Economic Growth (2015) as a story · 26 points
HN discussionThere are huge amounts macroeconomists don’t know but if they’re not scientists neither are epidemiologists or nutritionists. Experiments are impossible or necessarily tiny and of low quality in all those fields. Macroeconomics is not a healthy field making rapid progress. David D. Friedman’s verdict on it is that we know very little is true but we know plenty that isn’t. If you want to see someone really ripping in…
Comment linking /the-trouble-with-macro/
on “Singapore Urges U.S. to Accept China's Rise, Spare Other Nations”Submitted Escaping from Anaconda (Python) as a story · 16 points
HN discussionMainstream economics is a bit of a cult due to the identifiability problem. This is the problem that empirical evidence is ignored in most econometric papers and there is usually no way to identify economic events discretely that correspond to the ones mentioned in papers. Paul Romer, a professor at the Stern school of business, has published a great paper calling this out (pdf: https://paulromer.net/wp-content/uplo…
Comment linking /wp-content/uploads/2016/09/WP-Trouble.pdf
on “How economics became a religion”Submitted Paul Romer: What Went Wrong as a story · 13 points
HN discussionMainstream macro economics is 'captured', and they have been behaving like high priests justifying dubious policies. [1] The 80s onwards have seen massive CEO pay increases, financialization, asset inflation, deregulation, the vulgar celebration of greed by economists and on the other side wage stagnation, increasing inequality, the 2008 crisis and endless bailouts. Greenspan and others are happy to gloat about corn…
Comment linking /wp-content/uploads/2016/09/WP-Trouble.pdf
on “Post-crash economics: have we learnt nothing?”Submitted Jupyter, Mathematica, and the Future of the Research Paper as a story · 4 points
HN discussionHe was a strong contender last year as well. BTW, Paul Romer is also an entrepreneur: https://paulromer.net/about-paul-romer/ (relevant to this crowd :)).
Comment linking /about-paul-romer/
on “Why Paul Romer Won the Nobel Prize in Economics”Submitted Looting, Silicon Valley Edition as a story · 3 points
HN discussionRelatedly https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/06/opinion/tax-facebook-goog... https://paulromer.net/faqs-on-targeted-ads/
Comment linking /faqs-on-targeted-ads/
on “Czech Republic proposes the highest digital tax rate in Europe”Submitted Paul Romer : The Growth-Severity Confound as a story · 3 points
HN discussion> There is a wolfram blog post comparing python vs wolfram from 2021 Now the view from someone who quit Mathematica walled garden to embrace the Python ecosystem (2018): https://paulromer.net/jupyter-mathematica-and-the-future-of-...
Comment linking /jupyter-mathematica-and-the-future-of-the-research-paper/
on “Wolfram Notebook Assistant”Submitted Jupyter, Mathematica, and the Future of the Research Paper (2018) as a story · 3 points
HN discussionNeither Kay nor Romer are the clearest writers but I think Romer was clearly attacking Stigler (as well as Lucas and others at Chicago) and Kay was just repeating what Romer said. See this: http://paulromer.net/stigler-conviction-vs-feynman-integrity... I don't have access to Stigler's 1955 paper. It would be interesting to know what he was talking about but putting him in opposition to Feynman seems pretty harsh. I…
Comment linking /stigler-conviction-vs-feynman-integrity/
on “Beware “mathiness”: Algebra and data to reinforce ideological preconceptions”Submitted The Trouble with Macroeconomics (2016) [pdf] as a story · 3 points
HN discussion
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