Can a Headline Tell You Anything about an Article?

Furthering Slate.com's reputation for frivolous economic analysis*, Tim Hartford asks the question "Can physics explain why poor countries remain poor?" Want to know the answer? Well you won't get it from me.

It's not that I don't want to tell you the answer, it's that the subject of the article has nothing to do with the title. Apparently a couple physicists worked with some economists to produce an abstract map of economic space to see how different goods are connected (by the assumption that because if a lot of countries that export good A and good B, then somehow it is easy to move good A production to good B production and the productions of these two goods share some sort of connection).

Tim Hartford reads a lot into this (or maybe he just reads the authors' conclusions, I'm not excited enough about their pretty picture to read their actual research article). His point is that he doesn't know what physics is.

Just kidding, his point is that perhaps resource-rich poor countries can't diversify their economies because oil is fairly disconnected and far away other things on the map of abstract economic space. I'm not convinced that this map is any proof of anything. I think you're looking at a chicken-and-the-egg situation; has this illuminated a fundamental principle of economics (that switching from a resource-gathering activity to another economic activity is too woefully complex for poor countries to manage) OR is it telling us what we already know - that most countries rich in oil are run by corrupt assholes that don't bother to diversify their economies, thus skewing the data to show that oil production is not related to anything?

So, in summary, I would say that while I don't think they've proven that physics can explain why resource-rich countries can stay poor, I do think that you could use economics to explain why two physics PhD's would do economic analysis.

* - And highlighting a new publication of frivolous economic analysis - the magazine Science! Can someone tell me how this study got published in Science? I mean, it's sciencey, sure. They totally use some scientific analysis in economics, but I can't imagine how this is so ground-breaking as to deserve to be published in such a top journal. Maybe I'm going to actually have to read this article...