EconLog Archive
Fiscal Policy
Mainstream economists agree that we are Greece
The latest survey of the IGM panel of economists poses this: Long run fiscal sustainability in the U.S. will require cuts in currently promised Medicare and Medicaid benefits and/or tax increases that include higher taxes on households with incomes below $250,000. No one disagreed, although Emanuel Saez (who voted “uncertain”) wrote, The key is controlling .. MORE
International Trade
Does Peggy Noonan Understand Comparative Advantage?
In the controversy surrounding the uniforms of the 2012 U.S. Olympic team, the problem isn’t China. That the uniforms were made there is merely a deep embarrassment and a missed opportunity. Our textile and manufacturing companies deserved that work. You wonder how it could be that no one in the American Olympic Committee or in .. MORE
Business Economics
California: Land of the Free
I went on line a few days ago to order some vitamins. One of the items I ordered was Green Tea Complex. When I tried to place the order, I got a message in red saying that I couldn’t order Green Tea Complex. So I deleted that item and the order went through. Today I .. MORE
Behavioral Economics
Would Arnold Support an RFPB?
The world’s competing faiths subscribe to mutually incompatible doctrines – including doctrines about how to avoid eternal suffering in the afterlife. One of these faiths could conceivably be true. But no more than one. If there are X incompatible views, at least (X-1) are false. All of these incompatible faiths solicit money to stay in .. MORE
Economics of Education
Education and Disruption
Benjamin Lima writes, With MOOCs, now anyone in the world with an internet connection can download and watch lectures from eminent experts at top universities, for free, and hundreds of thousands have done so. This is indeed a huge leap forward in the area of knowledge transfer. But the equivalent leap in the area of .. MORE
Business Economics
August 1: Freedom for Western Canadian Wheat Farmers
On August 1 this year, the Canadian government’s monopsony over western Canadian wheat will end. For 68 years, farmers in western Canada have been able to sell their wheat legally only to one entity: the Canadian Wheat Board. But starting August 1, they will be able to sell their wheat to anyone they wish. One .. MORE
Economic Growth
Peter Thiel’s Question
Bryan has one angle. I have another. In this video, Thiel confronts Google CEO Eric Schmidt over the issue of Google’s cash hoard. If you have $50 billion in low-yielding investments, are you not more of a bank than a technology company? I think this question goes beyond any one company. It is a global .. MORE
Economic Growth
Thiel, Schmidt, and Consumption-Biased Technological Change
In a fascinating debate, Peter Thiel challenges Google’s Eric Schmidt: Google is a great company. It has 30,000 people, or 20,000, whatever the number is. They have pretty safe jobs. On the other hand, Google also has 30, 40, 50 billion in cash. It has no idea how to invest that money in technology effectively. .. MORE
Money and Inflation
Hummel on Graeber
Jeff Hummel sent me a critique of David Graeber’s book, Debt: The First 5000 Years. Jeff has given me permission to run an edited version. Here it is: I have read David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5000 Years thoroughly and despite Graeber’s readability, scholarship, and erudition, it is a very bad book. Its tone is .. MORE
Political Economy
Capital One vs. CFPB, again
For background, I recommend Fast Company’s article from 1999, which lauds Capital One’s creative use of the customer service process for up-selling. Those of you who are curious about the details of what is going on should find this helpful. Anyway, Don Boudreaux writes, The fact that a good number of people in fact do .. MORE
Labor Mobility, Immigration, Outsourcing
Ray Fisman on Structural Unemployment
He writes, Hurst notes that fewer and fewer Americans with a high school education or less are finding employment in manufacturing. This is a trend that accelerated in the late 1990s. Some of those lost jobs resulted in twentysomethings exiting the labor force. But a great many were absorbed by a thriving construction sector. Between .. MORE
Political Economy
Fraud, Preferences, and Paternalism
Don Boudreaux disagrees with my pro-CFPB post. He writes, Because the transactions in question are voluntary and among adults, it isn’t anyone else’s business what transpires between A and C. Would Arnold applaud a DHS ban on the sale of Big Macs, for it’s quite easy to construct an argument, very much like Arnold’s above, .. MORE
Cost-benefit Analysis
Social Darwinism vs. the Economic Way of Thinking
David Gordon has a fascinating piece on Social Darwinist defenses of capitalism: [I]t is difficult to find writers who called themselves “social Darwinists.” But some of Obama’s critics have gone too far. Jonah Goldberg, e.g., treats social Darwinism as largely a myth for which Richard Hofstadter, the author of Social Darwinism in American Thought (1944), .. MORE
Finance: stocks, options, etc.
Good for the consumer financial protection board
CNN money reports, Cardholders who enrolled in a payment protection or credit monitoring product — or who tried to cancel one of these products but were persuaded by a call center representative to keep it — on or after August 1, 2010, will be refunded the money they paid for the product, as well as .. MORE
Political Economy
Unintended Consequences of Intervention
Many libertarian and conservative economists I know are good at pointing out the unintended, and usually negative, consequences of domestic government policy. But a smaller subset of these people seem willing to look at foreign policy with the same skeptical eye. As I have written elsewhere [gated], they should be even more skeptical when looking .. MORE
Behavioral Economics
Olivia Fox Cabane on Charisma
She is the author of The Charisma Myth, a self-help book that I am in the middle of reading. Before you buy it (and before you comment on this post), I recommend watching this video, evidently from a talk given at Google (skip the guy doing the intro, which lasts about 1-1/2 minutes). So far, .. MORE
Economic and Political Philosophy
How I Love Education
When I write about education, I suspect I come off as a philistine. You might even boil my position down to: “Students are bored, and aren’t acquiring job skills, so their education is a waste of time and money.” But what about learning for its own sake? Why do I seem so closed to the .. MORE
Business Economics
Mitt Romney’s Passion
I don’t think of Mitt Romney as a passionate man. But there is one area in which I think he shows some passion: defending businesses and corporations from hostile attacks. I saw this when he argued that “corporations are people.” He made a simple point clearly and eloquently. Imagine George W. Bush in the same .. MORE
Politics and Economics
The Centrists Attempt to Regroup
I got an email the other day tipping me off to today’s launch of the Fix the Debt campaign, a bipartisan effort. These folks are the shattered remains of what used to be the center in American politics. I don’t question the sincerity of their intentions, but I think that reality has passed them by. .. MORE
Central Planning
Markets Don’t Ration
For example, Uwe Reinhardt, an economics professor and advocate of government-controlled medicine, writes, “In short, free markets are not an alternative to rationing. They are just one particular form of rationing. Ever since the Fall from Grace, human beings have had to ration everything not available in unlimited quantities, and market forces do most of .. MORE
Behavioral Economics
The Contributions of William T. Dickens
Tyler and Arnold have written engaging retrospectives on their Ph.D. cohorts at Harvard and MIT. But I’d rather discuss the contributions of Arnold’s classmate – and my undergraduate Econ 1 professor – William T. Dickens. Arnold’s right to say: Bill Dickens is known for his work on the Flynn effect and for attending my co-blogger’s .. MORE