Why doctors probably hate economists

I enjoyed reading this NY Times blog review of Emily Oster's new book about questioning the received wisdom from doctors about best practices during pregnancy.  It isn't too surprising that the advice runs conservative, to put it mildly, given how doctors can be sued for malpractice.

Krugman on theory

Here's a nice blog post by Paul Krugman about the death of theory, presumably in cutting edge Ph.D. dissertations and research. He writes how in trade and macro, his sense was that either theory could prove everything or nothing, respectively. My own two cents is that the unprecedented availability of new micro datasets and powerful personal computers to analyze them made empirical economics far more relatively salient.