Friday, April 17, 2015

The foundation


In writing the previous post, I looked up an old blog post I'd read by Cosma Shalizi about econophysics that I found very influential (listed below). That got me to thinking about the foundation of this blog along with what inspired my thinking and approach.

Aside from the thermodynamics I learned in school (from Reif and Landau and Lifshitz), my economics and information theory mostly comes from the internet (and some work-related stuff ... Terry Tao is pretty awesome). The Feynman Lectures on Computation are good too. This article [pdf] and the related paper cited in it are swimming around in the background, too. When I was in graduate school I considered going to into finance, as did many physicists in the late 90s and early 2000s and this book was my reference before my emails and interviews.

These links alone don't necessarily cover all of the technical details, but they do at least point to (or give some important search terms for) the resources and therefore were my starting points.

Here is the list:

Claude Shannon

You really don't need much more than this in terms of information theory to understand the next paper or this blog ...

Peter Fielitz and Guenter Borchardt

This paper is the basis of the information equilibrium model available at the time; the latest version (with a different title) is here.

Noah Smith

I started my blog a week after that post.

Noah Smith

This let me know the list of things I needed to learn before making a fool of myself, but presented in Noah's snarky style.

Cosma Shalizi

This forms the basis for the history of physicists attempting to point out how economists are wrong and largely being incorrect or ignored.

Cosma Shalizi

The greatest blog post ever written; also an excellent way to think about markets as human-created algorithms solving an optimization problem.

Scott Sumner

This came out two weeks before I started my blog. See also here (especially the footnote).

Paul Krugman

The macro of Paul Krugman and a good history lesson. The following few links as well ...

Paul Krugman

Paul Krugman

Paul Krugman

Brad DeLong

I don't link to this very much, but it is behind much of the presentation of the information equilibrium model in terms of changing curves (e.g. here and here).

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