| Wei Kang's Website |
| National University of Singapore |
| Department of Economics |

| My Research (Channels of Growth and Convergence, Evidence of Time-Inconsistency, Money Illusion, and Ricardian Non-equivalence) |
Other Writings:
| My Other Stuff |
pictures
from Copenhagen, Stockholm, and other
parts of Stockholm and Sweden
pictures from Angkor,
Cambodia (December 1 -- December 5, 2002)
pictures from Lantau Island - the Giant
Buddha (Dec 15, 2007)
Yet to be
Updated Photos (Since 2004)
Welcome
to my homepage. I got my Ph.D. degree from the Economics
Department at the
University of California at Berkeley.
Click here to go to my old
webpage (with
older pictures from my care-free days at Berkeley and the San Francisco
Bay). An
Archive of Macro Stuff. Another Archive
of Behavioral Stuff |
El Capitan, Yosemite National Park, 1997 The
Origin of Love, a great song lyrics. |
| Some Quotes |
"If you torture the data long enough, nature will
confess." (R.H.C.)
"But if you torture the parameters long enough, nature will also not
deny" (W-K.W.)
"In economics it takes a theory to kill a theory;
facts can only dent a theorist's hide" (P.A.S.)
Economic Theorists go to heaven after they
die.
Click here
to
get a sneak preview now!
Please be absolutely sure before you click it!!!
In Contrast to the unwritten rules whereby only certain stylized models are considered good economic theory, my own definition of "good economic theory" is that it poses interesting "if ... then ..." propositions relevant to some economic issue... There are two significant parts to this definition: one is the adjective interesting , the other is the phrase relevant to some economic issue . What constitutes an economic issue is empirically defined. According to Samuelson, interesting economic issues concern the what, how, and for whom of the distribution and use of economic resources... A second requirement for an interesting propositional (i.e., if ... then ...) statement is some surprise relative to what is implicit (or perhaps explicit) in the usual economics literature...
Good papers in economics
have three characteristics:
a viewpoint, a lever, and a result.
No amount of statistical evidence will make a
statement invulnerable to common sense.
Why, for example, should a Ph.D. be necessary to teach calculus?
Because there is a concept in the University about knowledge and how
one
should behave toward it... This view of the University is that there is
more knowledge out there than
you could possibly know. We cannot and will not teach you everything.
But we
will teach you something that is yet more valuable. We will teach you
what it
means to acquire knowledge... In
undergraduate education you are told quite early on to specialize. You
major in
some field. You may spend a good share of your senior year writing a
senior
thesis. We want you to learn as much as you can about some specialized
field in
four years' time.
Our view of education
then is two-fold. On the one hand we want this to be a
humbling experience. We want you to know that the knowledge to be
learned is
vast. At best even the greatest genius among all of you can know only a
tiny
fraction of it. Think about how long it takes to read a single book.
Then think
about the
But the purpose of the University is not just to leave you humbled. It is our real purpose also to teach you, like Frodo, how to operate in a world that is so potentially humbling.
Little by little, step
by step, the aim of this education is to show you how
in any chosen area, you can acquire the wisdom to deal with any given
problem.
An education is not a game of Trivial Pursuit. It is not just cramming
odd
facts into your head so you can win $1,000,000 on a TV quiz show. An
education
teaches you how to relate existing knowledge to any situation that may
arise.
This is what we are teaching when we tell Ph.D. students that their
education
is not complete until they have completed a new piece of research. They
must
understand then the relation between all existing knowledge and the
question
that they are trying to answer. By learning the procedures to sort out
how all
existing knowledge impacts one question, you learn the discipline
necessary to
do that for every other question.
I am a social scientist. As a social scientist I see the University then as changing who you are. I see the University as not just changing your views toward science, like physics or biology, or astronomy, or chemistry. I see it also as changing your attitude toward other people.
Every one of the social sciences teaches us that we can understand the motives of other people. People may be very different from us. Their motives may be very different from ours. Their means of expressing those motives may be strange indeed. Our knowledge about other people's problems makes their motives comprehensible to us. That means that we can see other people and their motives in our terms.
The
uneducated too often believe that a conflict of interest occurs because
other people are evil. The educated believe that conflicts of interest
naturally occur. Moreover, these conflicts occur especially because
other
people are basically so very much like ourselves. So the University
teaches us
to see other people's views. We have mercy for them.
| For the Apprentice |
| NUS
Economics Commencement 2007! |
|
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