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I hadn't even heard that there was an Economics Stack Exchange site before I learned that it will be closed down next week along with a bunch of other quiescent beta sites.

Update: As planned, the original Economics Stack Exchange was shut down shortly after I posted this back in 2012. A few years later, in 2014, a new Economics site was created at the same URL, and as of 2019 seems to be doing fine. This meta post is thus now only a historical curiosity. Sorry for any confusion!

As a side effect of shutting down the site and recreating it from scratch, the database (including all post and user IDs) was reset. Thus, any links to questions on the old Economics site below will, if clicked, now take you to a random question (or answer) on the new site that just happens to have the same ID number. I have struck out such broken links in this post.

It now looks like many of the other sites are going to be fully or partially absorbed into more active SE sites with overlapping topics, where their question can remain on the web and receive the tender care of an active community. However, no-one seems to have expressed an interest in Economics.SE yet.

Math.SE does have an tag. A quick look at the Economics.SE front page suggests that many of their 412 questions so far would be on topic for us. Here are a few random examples:

Some of the questions over there may be a bit "soft" for us (but then, we're not MO), and some may suffer from a lack of good answers (after all, there's a reason why the site's being closed down), but I do believe that many of them would fit in here.

Of course, we're no the only Stack Exchange site that could adopt some of these questions; besides Stats.SE (a.k.a. Cross Validated), there are also beta SE sites for Quantitative Finance and Personal Finance and Money. Some of the more computationally oriented questions might also find a home on StackOverflow, or perhaps on the Computational Science Stack Exchange beta. Then there's also Cognitive Sciences for behavioral economics, and History.SE for economic history questions.

(Whee, I had no idea there were that many SE beta sites around!)

I've posted about this on the Economics meta, but I'd like to request opinions and help from the Math.SE community here. If you'd like to help in keeping the more mathematical questions from Economics.SE on the web, here's what you can do:

  • Express your support for the migration process, so that the SE folks can tell that the community here is (as I hope, at least) in favor of it.
  • Go through the list of questions on Economics.SE and look for ones that could be usefully migrated here.
  • Collect links to the questions here, so that we can point an Economics mod at them before the site closes (example of such a list at SF&F meta). Or you could just flag the questions for migration directly, but this way we avoid needless duplicate flags.
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    $\begingroup$ Ouch, Theoretical Physics is also shutting down. For econ: I am not familiar with any of the topics you listed, so I will have no opinion. $\endgroup$ – Willie Wong Apr 26 '12 at 14:20
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    $\begingroup$ Fortunately, Theoretical Physics will probably be absorbed into Physics.SE, so the content (and hopefully at least some of the community) will live on. $\endgroup$ – Ilmari Karonen Apr 26 '12 at 14:23
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    $\begingroup$ Just a note: there are only 412 questions on Econ.SE, so Ilmari's request that someone familiar with the subject take a look at the site to look for salvageable material isn't really that much work. $\endgroup$ – Willie Wong Apr 26 '12 at 14:27
  • $\begingroup$ @WillieWong Not to be a drag, but I would think game theory would end up on Statistics. $\endgroup$ – Aarthi Apr 27 '12 at 19:45
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    $\begingroup$ @Aarthi: Why so? Game theory is a well established branch of mathematics, not of statistics. Besides, we have a game-theory tag, stats.SE doesn't. $\endgroup$ – Ilmari Karonen Apr 27 '12 at 20:07
  • $\begingroup$ @IlmariKaronen Ahhh. Okay, well then if that's the case, then huzzah! :D I always thought of game theory as a stats thing, but that's because I always was doing game theory work with econometric work. If it's math-y, then yay a new home. $\endgroup$ – Aarthi Apr 27 '12 at 20:17
  • $\begingroup$ @Ilmari: If you hadn't even realized there was an economics site and now it's closing down due to lack of interest, why is it important to migrate questions from there to math.SE? $\endgroup$ – KCd May 1 '12 at 14:47
  • $\begingroup$ @KCd: Some of them are pretty good questions (or at least have good answers). Some are even pretty decent math questions that just got posted there because they're about math as applied to economics. It would seem a shame to just dump them all into a database backup somewhere and forget about them. $\endgroup$ – Ilmari Karonen May 1 '12 at 15:08
  • $\begingroup$ See also meta.math.stackexchange.com/q/17545/18398 $\endgroup$ – Joel Reyes Noche Dec 4 '14 at 22:44
  • $\begingroup$ I'm confused. Nearly eight years after its impending demise was reported here, the Econ site seems to exist and to be accepting posts. Did it get a reprieve? $\endgroup$ – Gerry Myerson Feb 8 at 3:19
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    $\begingroup$ @GerryMyerson The "Economics SE" site that this post mentions was closed. (You can see the Area 51 stats here.) Later another Economics SE site was proposed, and that one continues to this day. $\endgroup$ – sie es er Feb 8 at 6:58
  • $\begingroup$ @Meta, thanks. I can see from the answer that was posted a few hours ago that I wasn't the only one confused. $\endgroup$ – Gerry Myerson Feb 8 at 8:12
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    $\begingroup$ I'm voting to close this question because it is obsolete. The old Economics site which this post is about was shut down in 2012, and a new site was created in its place in 2014. $\endgroup$ – Ilmari Karonen Feb 8 at 9:08
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Game theory questions

Out of the 11 questions tagged as game-theory, I believe the following could be on topic here:

I also flagged Can game theory explain grade inflation? for possible migration to academia.SE. That leaves two questions — Can misalignment in incentives within organisations be modelled using game theory? and Do “loss leaders” kill independent markets? — that I couldn't think of a good migration target for.

Homework questions

It also turns out that many of the questions tagged as homework are fairly mathematical in nature (who'd have thought?).

As noted, some of these are far from perfect, but they at least fall on the right side of my (perhaps somewhat inclusionist) line of "Would I vote to close this if I saw it here?" By the way, these lists are roughly in decreasing order of votes. I'm seeing something of a trend here, with the lowest scoring questions being more often suitable for migration, which is perhaps not so surprising.

I'll stop here for now, since it's late and I'm tired. I'll try to look through some more questions tomorrow, but in the mean time, feel free to look at these and strike out any that you'd rather not have migrated here.

Edit: I've flagged the questions marked with a $\star$ for migration here. I'll leave the rest for later consideration, and/or for others to flag if they feel they belong here. (Besides, I'm all out of flags now.)

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