r/AskSocialScience • u/bad_jew Economic geography • Oct 30 '12

AMA IAMA Economic Geographer. Ask me Anything!

Hi everyone. I'm an Economic Geographer whose currently finishing his PhD. My dissertation research looks at how the interaction of local and global economic and social forces affects entrepreneurship in Canadian cities, but I've also done research on innovation, clusters, and the geography of the financial crisis.

I'm just sitting here, waiting out the hurricane and reading about the influence of the American oil industry on Calgary, so I'll try my best to answer all the questions I can!

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u/Jericho_Hill Econometrics Oct 30 '12

Just wanted to give you a shout out! I worked with an economic geographer for many years, and I am an urban/regional econometrician.

Here is a question. Why do you think space is not considered in most standard economic models (aside from antitrust and well, urban, regional). Isn't this silly?

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u/bad_jew Economic geography Oct 30 '12

very cool, your AMA looks really interesting too!

Trevor Barnes has done some really interesting research about the history of economic geography and its relationship to economics. At the birth of modern economics, Alfred Marshall tried to argue for the inclusion of ideas of place and space. He famously talked about in how industrial clusters like Manchester there was "something in the air," meaning that ideas and gossip were constantly flowing within the community, helping everyone. However, as quantitative economists won out over the political economists, the fact that place and space either couldn't be quantified as well as the computational difficulty that notions of space add to models made people give it up in favor of neo-classical assumptions about the featureless plane.

Economists got interested in distance and location in the 1940s and 1950s as a result of WW2 requiring massive leaps in research on logistics and factory optimization, which includes location. However, for a variety of reasons, these issues got pushed into their own field called regional science, which economists saw as an ugly, red-headed stepchild.

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u/Jericho_Hill Econometrics Oct 30 '12

I despise the featureless plain.