EconLog Archive
Central Planning
I, Vaccine: How to Appreciate the Beautifully Simple
What a marvelous spectacle we have enjoyed this week, as the first wave of Covid-19 vaccines began shipping from Pfizer’s facilities in Michigan. Watching the news with my pre-teen son, as those box trucks rolled away carrying such precious frozen cargo, he said, “Wow, I bet that truck driver feels pretty good about his job .. MORE
Books: Reviews and Suggested Readings
Casey Mulligan on Donald Trump versus Jeb Bush
I found so many things memorable in Casey B. Mulligan’s recent book, You’re Hired: Untold Successes and Failures of a Populist President. I noted many of them in my Hoover article 2 months ago but didn’t have space for the following story. Here’s Casey: The conventional wisdom is that @realdonaldtrump is a window into the .. MORE
Uncategorized
Michael Oakeshott: A Hero for Whom?
Michael Oakeshott died thirty years ago. The Michael Oakeshott Association, which is a network of scholars who share an interest in his thought, maintains an interesting website with plenty of information about him and new initiatives concerning his work. Searching “Oakeshott” on Amazon, it seems apparent that there has been considerable interest in Oakeshott since .. MORE
Cross-country Comparisons
Reflections on the Yucatan
I just got back from two weeks in the Yucatan. Overall, a fantastic trip. Though Tyler told me we were crazy to go to Mexico during COVID, I’m sticking to the life course I set last June. And since almost all our activities were outdoors, we felt very safe. After factoring in the lower quality .. MORE
Economics of Education
More Charter Schools, Less Teen Suicide
School choice allows families to choose schools that are more suited to their children. These choices may affect non-academic outcomes, including students’ mental health. We empirically examine the relationship between school choice and mental health using two methods. First, we use difference-in-differences to estimate the effects of state voucher and charter school laws on adolescent .. MORE
Public Health
Adding Demand to Increase Excess Demand
Possible 11th Pillar of Economic Wisdom: When you’re in a hole, stop digging. One of the most absurd things that have happened with the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine is that politicians have been trying to increase demand for a vaccine of which, not surprisingly at a zero price, there is a shortage. The rationale for putting .. MORE
Free Markets
It’s not just housing
Here’s a tweet by Matt Yglesias: Is it really that “strange”? Yes, there’s far too much government planning in the housing sector. But housing is a laissez-faire paradise compared to America’s second largest sector—health care. And health care is a laissez-faire paradise compared to America’s third largest sector—education. And then there’s agriculture. Law. Transportation. I .. MORE
Macroeconomics
Understanding MMT
I’ve mostly completed my study of MMT, although I have a few more papers to read. But I feel like I know enough to draw a few conclusions about how MMT relates to the broader field of economics. When reading the Macroeconomics textbook by Mitchell, Wray and Watts, I was frequently struck by how MMT .. MORE
Economics of Education
My Work Continuage: A Confession
I have a confession: I continued working even though I was told not to. I was reminded of this by this article by Mckenna Dallmeyer, Texas Senior Campus Correspondent for Campus Reform. It’s titled “State auditor demands nearly $2k from Ole Miss prof who went on ‘illegal’ strike,” Campus Reform, December 14, 2020. Here’s what .. MORE
Macroeconomics
Whip ambiguity now!
This post was inspired by a recent Tyler Cowen post, entitled “I’m not so worried about inflation”. The post itself is fine and I’m not going to comment on it. Instead, it was the title that sparked my interest. What might a person mean when they say they are not so worried about inflation? I .. MORE
Economics of Education
Who Said It?
Education is not a pure public good. The marginal cost of educating an additional child is far from zero; indeed, the marginal and average costs are (at least for large school districts) approximately the same. And there is no difficulty in charging an individual for use of this service. Those who seek to justify .. MORE
Books: Reviews and Suggested Readings
Jim Crow: More Racist than the Railroads
It is not always understood how governments and the public sector are more inclined to bow to popular discriminatory bigotry than private businesses, because of the incentives of their respective actors. As Gary Becker argued, private businesses have to pay the cost of their discrimination. Only if their owners, or perhaps a large number of .. MORE
Central Planning
Great Moments in Central Planning
I told you so. I thought from the getgo that having the federal government, under Operation Warp Speed, monopsonize the COVID-19 vaccine and then use central planning to distribute it at a zero price, was a bad idea. I criticized the central planning way to distribute it in “Vaccines’ Last Hurdle: Central Planners,” Defining Ideas, .. MORE
Economics of Health Care
The FDA’s Deadly Caution
The earliest Moderna probably would have sold the mRNA-1273 vaccine would have been after it began scaling up manufacturing. A company doesn’t begin manufacturing until it believes in a product. In the timeline above, that’s March 23. But manufacturing takes some time to get going. Let’s assume that by April 1, five weeks from the .. MORE
Behavioral Economics
Partisanship and Support for Immigration
Here’s a neat new piece in Social Science Quarterly by Richard Hanania. The set-up: I conducted a preregistered study with a representative sample of white Americans. The survey asked them how open they would be to accepting certain refugees into the United States. The characteristics of the refugees were changed along the following three dimensions: Race: .. MORE
Information Goods, Intellectual Property
Should John Brennan Be Accountable?
Tyler Cowen’s latest “Conversations with Tyler” is an interview of former CIA Director John Brennan. If you read the whole interview, you see that Tyler has done due diligence by reading background material on Brennan. Unfortunately, Tyler doesn’t ask him a thing about Brennan’s lying to Congress about the fact that his CIA staff, at .. MORE
International Macroeconomics
The Swiss cost of living is too low
At least that’s the claim of the US government. Today, the US government accused Switzerland of artificially depressing the value of its currency in the foreign exchange market. This is rather odd, as Switzerland is generally considered to be the country with the strongest currency in the entire world. Since 1971, the value of the .. MORE
Behavioral Economics
Call It Sour Grapes
I got my Ph.D. in economics from Princeton in 1997. Twenty-three years after graduation, I remain a professor at a mid-ranked school. The odds that I’ll ever get a job at a top-20 department look awfully low. How do I feel about this situation? The socially approved response, at least within social science, is to .. MORE
Economics and Culture
Happy birthday, LvB!
250 years ago today Ludwig van Beethoven was born. Beethoven’s greatness is quite too obvious to comment on it. The great composer had liberal sentiments; he had great hope in the French Revolution and in Bonaparte as a liberator, yet he was disappointed by the Napoleon crowning himself and came to resent him. Jim Powell .. MORE
Institutional Economics
Generally Accepted Rules and the Election
To a large extent, people do what is generally expected from them, simply because it simplifies their lives in society. This is how and why rules develop that facilitate social coexistence. The danger is that these rules turn out to be stifling and economically inefficient, which means that they impede trade, innovation, and prosperity. Primitive .. MORE
Fiscal Policy
No free lunch for government debt
Matt Yglesias has a post advocating fiscal stimulus in the form of checks sent to all Americans. While discussing the bonds that would be issued to finance the increased deficit, Yglesias makes this claim: The federal government needs to pay interest on the bonds, but that interest becomes Fed profits which are rebated to the .. MORE