EconLog Archive
Economics of Education
My Weekly Reading and Viewing for August 24, 2025
Are the BLS and Other Government Statistical Agencies Partisan? Here’s What My Research Found by Vincent Geloso, The Daily Economy, August 18, 2025. Excerpt: There is little to substantiate the claim that the BLS produces low-quality data. The BLS (and every other statistical agency) frequently issues preliminary reports from surveys it conducts. As such, revisions .. MORE
Economic History
When the Big Apple Went Bust: Bankruptcy and Austerity in New York, 1975
In 1975, New York City’s government ran out of money. “On the simplest level” journalist Martin Mayer wrote, “the story of New York’s financial collapse is the tale of a Ponzi game in municipal paper – the regular and inevitably increasing issuance of notes to be paid off not by the future taxes of revenue .. MORE
Economic Theory
“They” not “It”: Understanding Group Behavior Through Methodological Individualism
In his 1992 article “Congress is a ‘They,’ not an ‘It’: Legislative Intent as Oxymoron” (International Review of Law and Economics 12 (2)), Harvard University political scientist Kenneth Shepsle opens: An oxymoron is a two-word contradiction. The claim of this brief paper is that legislative intent, along with military intelligence, jumbo shrimp, and student athlete, .. MORE
Economics of Health Care
Make Drug Approval Easier
A few days ago, I listened to Russ Roberts’s EconTalk interview of cardiologist Eric Topol on the health issues involved with aging. For some reason, I’m getting increasingly interested in that issue. An interesting issue comes up at about 36:00 point. Topol states: We should be using better nanoparticles and keeping that mRNA from .. MORE
Moral Reasoning
Meanwhile, in Mexico
A report in the Financial Times indicates that Mexico is in the process of eliminating the checks and balances in its political system: But the bills passed in the past two weeks ultimately implement key elements of the former president’s agenda, including eliminating autonomous regulators and replacing them with ones under greater central government control. .. MORE
#ReadWithMe
We Have Never Been Woke Part 7: Victimhood Culture
(This post is part 7 of a series of posts on We Have Never Been Woke by Musa al-Gharbi. The previous entry is here.) One of the questions that animated Musa al-Gharbi’s investigation into the causes and consequences of wokeness was why highly successful elites seem so eager to portray themselves as otherwise. As he .. MORE
International Trade
Useful Counterfactuals on Trade
Counterfactuals are a necessary part of any scientific analysis: If X didn’t happen, then Y would have. But counterfactuals, by definition, can never be known. They never occurred, so we can never truly know if the counterfactual would have happened. For example, there was much debate in the Truman Administration and the US military during World .. MORE
Labor Market
A Serious Look at Interest Rates
These tweets caught my eye: I suspect that it would be possible to create some sort of argument that the AI boom is hurting the job market, but at the risk of being unserious I don’t find this one to be particularly persuasive. Suppose I made the following argument: Interest rates would be lower if .. MORE
International Trade
Freedom as a Loophole
The August 29 planned abolition of the de minimis customs exemption in the United States may come as a shock to those who believe that, as the physical universe is made of visible matter and dark matter, the political world is made of Democratic and Republican stuff, “the Left” and “the Right.” The restriction of .. MORE
Economic Education
Fentanyl Elasticity: Cutsinger’s Solution
Question: Suppose the demand for fentanyl is perfectly inelastic, and that the users of fentanyl steal from others to acquire the money to pay for it. In an effort to crack down on fentanyl use, the government imposes harsher penalties on suppliers of fentanyl, reducing its supply. How will this policy affect the amount of .. MORE
Economic History
My Weekly Reading and Viewing for August 17, 2025
Government Should Experiment with Eliminating Patient Barriers, Not with Covering Ozempic by Akiva Malamet, Bautista Vivanco, and Michael F. Cannon, Cato at Liberty, August 11, 2025. Excerpts: While Ozempic and other GLP‑1 drugs are great at helping patients lose weight(among many other promising uses), these impressive medications come with an impressive price tag. For those paying out of .. MORE
Property Rights
Not in my back pocket (NIMBP)
Most advanced countries are democracies. In most cases, these countries impose heavy taxes, with total revenues often falling between 30% and 50% of GDP. And yet, most people don’t like paying taxes. How can we explain this seeming contradiction? The mainstream view of both the economics profession and the general public seems to be that .. MORE
Incentives
Fascinating Interview of Anne Krueger
I have for many years argued that Anne Krueger and Jagdish Bhagwati should be awarded the Nobel Prize in economics for their work on trade, protectionism, and economic development. Indeed, they should have shared the 2008 Nobel with Bhagwati’s student Paul Krugman. The extensive interview of Krueger in the latest issue of the Journal of .. MORE
#ReadWithMe
We Have Never Been Woke Part 6: Consequences of Awokenings
In the last post in this series, we looked at Musa al-Gharbi’s description in We Have Never Been Woke of what causes Awokenings to rise and eventually fall, what are the long term consequences of these movements? Given that Awokenings consist of wealthy and elite members of the symbolic capitalist class rising in support of .. MORE
International Trade
Evaluating the US-Japan Trade Deal on Mercantilist Terms
Short Version: it’s bad, even by the preferred metrics of protectionists. On July 23, US and Japanese trade negotiators reached a deal on tariffs, investments, and other international transactions. Much has been written about how bad the deal is from a standard economic perspective (see, for example, here). But President Trump and his administration, who .. MORE
Economic Education
Two Economic Ideas That are True and Nontrivial
Timothy Taylor, at Conversable Economist, had a post on August 13 titled “What Economic Ideas are True and Nontrivial?” He starts with a famous story that Paul Samuelson told and I’ll quote it here: [O]ur subject puts its best foot forward when it speaks out on international trade. This was brought home to me years .. MORE
Central Planning
Today’s Convergence of Political Systems
In the 1960s and 1970s, a fashionable idea, at least among the Western intelligentsia, was the convergence between socialism (read: communism) and capitalism. Even less obvious than today was the true distinction between, on one side, a regime of individual and private choice and, on the other side, a system of collective and political choice. .. MORE
#ReadWithMe
We Have Never Been Woke Part 5: The Cause of Awokenings
As I mentioned in my last post, Musa al-Gharbi argues in We Have Never Been Woke that the post-2011 Awokening – that is, the rise of social justice activism and the escalating adoption of social justice ideology among the symbolic capitalist class – was not an unprecedented event. He argues that Awokenings have occurred before and have .. MORE
Cryptocurrency
Stable/Genius: Stablecoins and Free Banking
President Trump signed the Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for U.S. Stablecoins Act (GENIUS Act) into law on July 18th, promising to “cement American dominance of global finance and crypto technology.” In his post-signing speech, the president explained, “the GENIUS Act provides banks, businesses and financial institutions, a framework for issuing crypto assets backed one .. MORE
Property Rights
Federalism and Housing Policy
The Economist has an interesting article speculating that the red state advantage in housing affordability may be about to shrink: But what if red states’ cheap-housing advantage were to start shrinking? That may already be happening in places: a study by Edward Glaeser of Harvard University and Joseph Gyourko of the University of Pennsylvania published .. MORE
Economics and Culture
The Future of Art with AI
AI art and music are quite amazing. In seconds, you can create fun images. To wit, below is a photorealistic image I created with ChatGPT of Adam Smith and David Hume having lunch and Hume sticking Smith with the bill: Or a cartoon image of my summer bowling league team, the Cosmic Colonels: Both of .. MORE