#notallphysicists
Someone posted this XKCD comic on the EJMR forum in reference to my blog, specifically this series of posts ([1], [2]).
And I agree this is a pretty good takedown of physicists jumping over into other fields (this is another good one specific to economics). But it also represents a complete misunderstanding of what the posts were about and my general approach.
Just model it as a < simple object > ...
My actual criticism was that the RCK model was vastly more complicated than economists made it out to be (even in a graduate level textbook) and that transversality conditions were actually most of the economic content of the model. The differential equations defining the model itself were little more than accounting identities.
... add some secondary terms to account for < complications I just thought of > ...
I hadn't just thought of the complications -- they were the primary subject of the post. Nick Rowe and commenter LAL, both economists, made the same assumption that it was just neophyte musings and I had missed the point of the transversality conditions. But again, the main point was that transversality conditions were most of the economic content of the model.
... why does < your field > need a whole journal, anyway?
What's funny about this piece of the comic is that the entire reason I was looking at the RCK model was that I was going through Romer's Advanced Macroeconomics (the aforementioned graduate level textbook) and trying to learn economics as one would as a member of the field.
In addition, I take great pains to attempt to reproduce mainstream economic results using the information equilibrium framework. For example:
In the end, I think economics is an interesting and complex field (hence why I spend so much of my free time working on it), not something trivial that can be solved quickly by writing down the right Lagrangian. I do think economists have framed the problem incorrectly (in terms of individual human behavior), but many economists share at least part of that criticism (problems with microfoundations).