The 2015 edition of the eponymous Which Famous Economist are you Similar to? interactive tool is now available, and once again — though once again I probably shouldn’t be telling you this — yours truly has been paired with Daren Acemolgu. (Acemoglu, as you possibly know, is the MIT superstar economist who is the subject of the Daren Acemoglu Facts tumblr page, chock full of economist “humor”).
As far as the Which Famous Economist site goes, the data are from the University of Chicago’s IGM Economic Experts Panel, which periodically surveys many economists on issues of the day. The matching is done via principal components, which is somewhat ironic, given principal-component modeling isn’t really part of the economist’s standard canon of quantitative tools.
If you decide to take the poll, I recommend that you leave the questions you haven’t thought about (or don’t know anything about) blank. The authors say that “accuracy” requires at least 20 responses out of the 30 questions.
I’m the red dot, and the arrow points to Professor Acemoglu. Robert Hall and José Scheinkman are the dots closest to mine, and you can read the explanation for why I was not paired with one of them in the figure’s legend.
The site also allows you to highlight where your views differ from the consensus view (I have a higher opinion of my peers’ knowledge of book prices, for example.) It also contains a correlation matrix for each economist in the survey pool — all are positively correlated!
See you next year.
