EconLog Archive
Economic Growth
Entrepreneurs and “giving back”
Tim Worstall comments on a paper by William Nordhaus on the private vs. social returns of innovation. As a factor of production, the entrepreneur class (and yes, we have been considered for decades to be a factor of production to go alongside the more traditional land, labor and capital) is getting a raw deal and .. MORE
Tax Reform
All Holes, No Cheese?
Steven Pearlstein reports on your elected representatives at work this election year. Congress was unveiling the final details of a corporate tax bill so laden with subsidies, and so infused with government industrial policy, that any Eurocrat would be proud to call it his own. When President Bush in his acceptance speech followed his call .. MORE
Economic Education
Publication Tournament?
If I think that economics students should be given ratings like tournament chess players, then naturally I would like this suggestion from David Tufte for evaluating academic research, maintaining quality, and speeding up the process. Send 2 papers to an anonymous referee. Have them pick the best one. Only! Pair the winner with the winner .. MORE
International Trade
Trade Conference
I attended most of this Cato Institute Conference on trade, outsourcing, and the labor market. A few notes: Federal Reserve Board Vice-Chairman Roger Ferguson’s opening speech was outstanding. I commend it to anyone who teaches undergraduate economics as a useful summary of the issues. He stole the thunder of many of the subsequent speakers. Ferguson’s .. MORE
Economic Education
Revolution in Academic Affairs?
Last week, I got together with Russ Roberts of Cafe Hayek. Yesterday, I had lunch with Alex Tabarrok of Marginal Revolution and two not-yet-blogging economists, Robin Hanson and Bryan Caplan. Several topics came up that are worth some comment. Economics journals and blogs. What can be done to raise the signal-to-noise ratio of economics journals? .. MORE
Social Security
The Need for Savings
In this essay, I argue that because people live longer and consume more health care, we should be saving more. Suppose that 50 years ago the expectation for a 45-year-old man was that he would live to age 70, and that health care costs would be, in today’s terms, $1000 per year after retirement, at .. MORE
Economic Education
Two Thoughts on Economic Education
First, just a technical note. A fellow named Chris Cardinale sent me a tip that software called “Total Recorder” from a web site highcriteria.com creates really small sound files from .wav files. I downloaded and registered the software, for twelve bucks, and it works great. It compressed an 18-minute lecture down to a 1-meg file, .. MORE
Economic and Political Philosophy
Nobel Prize Speculation
Various economics blogs, such as Division of Labour, are speculating on candidates for this year’s Nobel Prize in economics. One thing I’ve noticed is that the winners tend to be people with concepts named after them. Coase theorem. Nash equilibrium. Black-Scholes pricing model. Granger causality. It seems like you’re better off with one brand-name contribution .. MORE
Social Security
Forced Savings vs. Social Security
Brad DeLong endorses privatized Social Security, if what you mean by that is forced savings. Too many households are myopic: they do not save enough. Households resist increases in Social Security taxes–they see no link between the taxes and their future benefits. But if Social Security were privatized so that households saw their Social Security .. MORE
Efficient Markets Hypothesis
Oil Bubble?
Any time a price increases rapidly, somebody argues that there is a bubble (although I have not heard anyone proclaim a health care bubble). Here is Frank P. Leuffer on oil. IEA figures for the first half of the year show an increase in world oil demand of 3 million barrels a day against an .. MORE
Economic and Political Philosophy
Socialism as Primitivism
Madsen Pirie writes, Hayek told his rapt audience that the old values of the hunting band still had their allure, including the urge to share everything when value could not be stored… Members of the audience actually gasped when Hayek referred to Socialism as ‘atavistic’ – the reversion to an older, more primitive form. Many .. MORE
Economics of Health Care
health care
I attended this Cato forum on health care reform options. Speakers were Sally Pipes, John Goodman, Jeff Lemieux, and Robert Kuttner. A few notes: Best one-liner belonged to Kuttner: “The hardest job for a liberal is to defend the D.C. public school system. The hardest job for a conservative is to defend free-market health care.” .. MORE
Economic and Political Philosophy
In Praise of Temperance
Deirdre McCloskey writes that economists no longer view underconsumption as a threat to full employment. Nothing would befall the market economy in the long run, says the modern economist, if we tempered our desires to a thrifty style of life–one old Volvo and a little house with a vegetable garden and a moderate amount of .. MORE
Austrian Economics
In Praise of Failure
Glenn Harlan Reynolds discusses the X-prize for private space travel using a rather Austrian viewpoint. But in all sorts of areas — from space and jet aviation in the 1950s and 1960s, to computers in the 1970s and 1980s, to the X-Prize today — it seems that we make faster progress when we have lots .. MORE
International Trade
Outsourcing Data
Daniel Drezner writes that actual data on outsourcing has been hard to come by. Now, however, we can add some actual figures to the overheated debate. The Government Accountability Office has issued its first review of the data, and one undeniable conclusion to be drawn from it is that outsourcing is not quite the job-destroying .. MORE
Economics of Health Care
Economics of Health Insurance
In this essay, I contend that what most people think of as health insurance is not technically insurance, but something else. An equivalent plan for restaurant meals would be that instead of paying for your meal, you would pay an annual premium to “Blue Eats,” which would in turn reimburse restaurants for their costs, plus .. MORE
Economic Education
Economic Illiteracy
Bryan Caplan summarizes some evidence. One of the first things that stands out is anti-foreign bias. When they contemplate economic interaction with foreigners, the general public gets unreasonably negative… A second major pattern in the public’s economic illiteracy is make-work bias…In the long-run, blaming technology for unemployment is just silly. As the mechanization of agriculture .. MORE
Social Security
Social Security and Real Production
Don Lloyd decries the accounting approach to Social Security. The common flaw in all of the proposed remedies above is that they focus on dollars and money. This is too narrow and ignores the fact that the primary end goal of an economy is the actual consumption of goods and services. Production would be pointless .. MORE
Economic Education
mp3’s and lectures
Tyler Cowen asks, Why don’t econ bloggers post their classroom and public lectures? I already do. I add one or two per week. The latest one includes an interactive quiz. I record them using an Olympus DS330 digital voice recorder. The files are very small in their proprietary format, but that format is otherwise user-hostile, .. MORE
Growth: Consequences
Escalation of Income
In this essay, I suggest using an escalator rather than a pie as a metaphor for differences in income. Overall, over 60 percent of families surveyed in 1975 made it to the top 40 percent in 1991. If the “distribution of income” were a pie, this would be mathematically impossible… To solve the apparent mystery, .. MORE
Energy, Environment, Resources
Environmental Economics
Joe Katzman has a long, thoughtful post on the economics of common resources, notably water. Perhaps it’s also time to factor these eco-services into a variant of GNP, so their depletion and restoration would both show on a national balance sheet. This move would highlight the depletion of economically valuable natural capital, and also reward .. MORE