What amazes me about economists is their lack of curiousity. They have an amazingly interesting subject, a wealth of material to unearth, digest, analyse, a range of fascinating research in relate fields to draw upon and integrate into their field, and yet they seem largely content to sit around and play with theoretical models, occasionally testing them against some very restricted set of numbers. Climate scientists climb glaciers, take tree cores and lake sediment samples, painstakingly check changes in gauge locations and surroundings [Ed.: and build and launch Earth-observing satellites and digest volumes of data they generate]; physicists build colliders and measure the rotation of distant galaxies; sociologists talk to slum dwellers. Economists mostly seem to find visting the local factory or labour exchange a bit hard. Why do they have so little fun?

– Peter T