I typically get irritated by “the economics of”-style arguments, which to me look more like intellectual turf-grabbing than anything else. But this one, by Adam Ozimek, is good. Nothing deep–nor does he claim depth for his argument–but amusing and completely reasonable.
When would you not be irritated by "the economics of"-style arguments? If everyone respected your irritation by refraining from making such arguments, economics would never expand. And that seems to me like it would be a pity.
Michael:
I have no problem with interdisciplinary work (and, of course, I was not irritated by "the economics of" article linked to above). What I'm less impressed by is when people take some bit of social behavior that's not particularly economic in nature and call it "economics." Sometimes this works and you get interesting insights; other times it seems to me the work would be stronger if such problems were studied directly without the economics analogies.
In any case, I'm merely expressing my irritation; I'm not trying to censor. If I really thought that everybody would respect my irritation by refraining etc., I'd be much more circumspect and careful about abuse of power!
Thanks for clarifying! The motivation for my comment was the fact that, although I'm not an economist, I find the meta-question "what would an economist say?" a very valuable one whenever I'm thinking about a situation where there's a scarce resource. In any case, your reply certainly clarifies what you meant.