Fantasy league lets economists indulge their animal spirits
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
January 14, 2014
By David Nicklaus ([email protected])
If you’re a numbers geek seeking to fill the gap between the football
and baseball fantasy seasons, the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis
has a new game for you: Fantasy economics.
The game is based on a ranking system called RePEc, which is short for
Research Papers in Economics. It ranks economists based on how often
their work is cited in other economists’ papers.
The St. Louis Fed, which hosts a RePEc database, recently started a
fantasy league in which economists can be bought and sold using an
imaginary currency called utils. (For those of you who have forgotten
your Econ 101, economists often talk about the util as a hypothetical
unit for measuring utility, or happiness.)
Each new participant in the game starts with 25 economists and 100
utils. The economists are randomly assigned, so you should get some
star players and some also-rans. You can put some of your economists
up for auction, or use your currency to bid on players from other
teams. You also get the fun of deciding which economists should sit on
the bench.
Forget about drafting a Keynes or a Friedman, though: Dead economists
don’t count. The league is perpetual, since economics doesn’t have a
season. You don’t get the daily thrill of fantasy baseball action, but
you do find out once a month how your team is doing. That’s how often
the RePEC rankings are updated.
According to a Business Insider article about the league, fantasy
economics started as an April Fool’s joke dreamed up by Christian
Zimmerman, an assistant vice president at the St. Louis Fed. People
told him it sounded like fun, so he turned his phantom league into a
real one.
If you’re intrigued by the action and want to learn who the Peyton
Mannings and Tom Bradys of the economics world are, the current author
rankings show Daron Acemoglu of MIT in first place, followed by Andrei
Shleifer of Harvard and James J. Heckman of the University of Chicago.
Some of the fantasy rules are probably necessary only in a league of
economics geeks. Debt and short-selling are both banned, for
example. And, alas, you can’t reinvest your football winnings here:
Playing with real money is not allowed.
David Nicklaus is business columnist at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
Subscribe to his Facebook page or follow him on Twitter @dnickbiz.