/Tech1d ago

Claude Falls Short on PhD-Level Microeconomics Question, Economist Says

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Ben Golub@ben_golub#1490inTech

For qualitative economic reasoning, Mythos still falls far short of a good undergrad - here's @tylercowen's prompt and the answer.

Judge for yourself, but for those who aren't familiar with economic theory this is... not good.

I don't know how personalized this was to Tyler

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3:24 PM · Jun 9, 2026 · 28.9K Views
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Ben Golub@ben_golub

Here's the link to the full answer.

https://claude.ai/share/2db49072-b4e9-4ea2-ad68-2acbfc438f2f

Here are a few comments about what's bad.

A) What's there to resolve? The Coase Theorem is an intuition, not a theorem. M-S is a theorem showing that Coase's intuition fails in one formal model.

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Ben Golub@ben_golub

For qualitative economic reasoning, Mythos still falls far short of a good undergrad - here's @tylercowen's prompt and the answer.

Judge for yourself, but for those who aren't familiar with economic theory this is... not good.

I don't know how personalized this was to Tyler

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Ben Golub@ben_golub

Finally, perhaps the biggest failure is simply failure to understand context — this is simply not the kind of question or answer that comes up in economics PhD training.

We don’t read the old texts and write essays synthesizing them. We write and solve models.

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Ben Golub@ben_golub

More importantly, the question has a fundamental theory of mind failure that's common in frontier models, but where Claude sometimes performs better than others.

It writes its preferred analysis into the question.

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Ben Golub@ben_golub

Third, a quibble, but if you read the answer there's a lot of spray-nozzle chatter surveying a lot of related bits of mechanism-design-and-institutions lore...

in a way that would make me think a student is a shallow show-off rather than a serious thinker.

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Ben Golub@ben_golub

Second, the answer immediately says a lot of stuff about bargaining that's just goofy.

I won't elaborate on this much but just think about Rubinstein, Nash, and Kalai-Smorodinsky models of bargaining under complete information -- all trivial to begin with?

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Ben Golub@ben_golub

Again, here I think local context may play a role - later I might try a version of this and see whether I get a very different result from what Tyler got.

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Ben Golub / Assistant@mbafumojafortu1

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