Econ Ipsum Now Available in TeX

About two years ago, Maria Betto and I made Econ Ipsum, a Lorem Ipsum generator that uses words from Econometrica abstracts to produce Economic sounding nonsense. We never put any sort of tracking or analytics on the page. So, I don’t know how many people use it. However, I can tell from the number of api calls that it is more than originally expected.^[1]

One long running joke on the page is that the randomized articles have zero citations and are “not forthcoming”. That is, we remind that the random text is not a reference for any other article and is not scheduled for publication in any journal. These facts were intended to be self-evident. So, I was surprised when a student contacted me to ask if he could use some random paragraphs in a TeX package he was working on.

Naturally, I was ecstatic that someone liked Econ Ipsum enough to make a spinoff. So, I’m happy to announce that you can now use Econ Ipsum paragraphs in TeX via the econlipsum package by Jack Coleman. So, Econ Ipsum’s citation counter – intended to remain forever at zero – has now advanced to one.

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1. The number of api executions is the maximum number of paragraphs requested by a single person divided by 100 (and rounded up). Each day (typically) has between 3 and 30 executions. On one day, there were 184 executions – which means that one person generated 18,400 paragraphs. ↩︎