EconLog Archive
Labor Market
Sin City and the Bizarre World of Entertainers’ Unions
Sin City opens on April 1. I haven’t been as enthusiastic about a movie trailer since The Return of the King. And it’s got a cool backstory too. Director Robert Rodriguez dropped out of the Directors Guild of America (DGA) because union rules prevented him from naming graphic novelist Frank Miller as co-director. DGA rules .. MORE
Austrian Economics
The Myth of Time Preference
How come interest rates are always positive? Austrian economists have a stock answer: it’s because of time preference. All else equal, we prefer satisfaction sooner rather than later. If we did not have time preference, we would never consume anything, because we would keep delaying consumption. As Mises puts it: We must conceive that a .. MORE
Growth: Consequences
The Hopeful Science
Richard Cooper writes, Development as a global policy objective dates from the 1940s. Relative to expectations then, the world economy performed outstandingly well during the second half of the 20th century. Worldwide growth in average per capita income exceeded two percent a year (historically unprecedented), many poor countries became rich, infant mortality declined, diets improved, .. MORE
Regulation and Subsidies
Motives and Consequences
Hedge Fund Guy writes, Costs of lending are always passed on to the consumer. No one is forced to lend (well, there is the Community Reinvestment Act, but that’s a quid pro quo, and an exception), so lenders will either pass increased costs along, or withdraw from the highest risk market segments. Making it harder .. MORE
Growth: Consequences
Was Herbert Spencer Reincarnated as Julian Simon?
I’ve come across an essay by Herbert Spencer that is eerily reminiscent of the work of the late great Julian Simon. Writing in the late 19th-century, Spencer proposes the following relationship between objective conditions and public opinion: “[T]he more things improve the louder become the exclamations about their badness.” When life was poor, nasty, solitary, .. MORE
Uncategorized
Caplan Now a Co-
Bryan Caplan’s stint as guest blogger is over. His new gig is as co-blogger. Please welcome Bryan to what Steven Kirchner calls–in a hilarious post by the way, you must read it–The Bubble in Economics Blogs.
Business Economics
Movie Economics
Tyler Cowen posts on one of my favorite topics, movie economics. a multiplex will charge the same ($9.50 in my case) for the number one movie and for a flop. Nor is the price more expensive for Saturday night, or during the summer when demand is higher. Can any economic model predict these results? Of .. MORE
Economic Growth
Finance, Risk and Growth
A reader of my piece on math and economics connected me to this 1998 Forbes cover story on Reuven Brenner. Forbes Global: Finance is central to your view of creating wealth. Why is it so important? Brenner: Because finance is what stops persistent mistakes. Competitive financial markets will not provide capital indefinitely to entrepreneurs whose .. MORE
Microeconomics
Solve Tyler’s Puzzle
Tyler Cowen has a number of hypotheses about why all movies cost the same price. As a frequent movie-goer, I’d like to know, but I don’t find any of his answers too convincing. A lot of the problem gets solved today by matching up popular movies with theaters with bigger seating capacity, but I’m still .. MORE
Microeconomics
Get Ready for Rhoads: Test Your Gender Identity
The Larry Summers controversy (see here and here) is probably going to make it even harder to do no-holds-barred research on the fascinating subject of gender identity. But fortunately, academia is probably still too competitive for obscurantism to triumph. Evolutionary biology has stood fast against religious fundamentalism for over a century; I don’t think evolutionary .. MORE
Politics and Economics
Economic Debate
Brad DeLong writes, I am cranky, and annoyed. And I am not asking for very much. All I want is: * No more claims that we know that carving-out Social Security revenues to fund private accounts will have no damaging effect on national saving. It might work. It might not. * No more claims that .. MORE
Institutional Economics
Internet Governance
Alex Simonelis writes, Certain protocols, and the parameters required for their usage, are essential in order to operate on the Internet. A number of bodies have become responsible for those protocol standards and parameters. It can be fairly said that those bodies steer the Internet in a significant sense. This document is a summary of .. MORE
Microeconomics
Howard Hughes and the Economics of Mental Illness
I finally saw The Aviator, and it’s hard not to scream “Scorsese was robbed!” Larry White has already done a great job of analyzing the bread-and-butter economics of the story. What’s fascinating to me, however, is the exploration of Hughes’ eccentricity/mental illness. I am a big fan of psychiatrist Thomas Szasz (pronounced like the statistical .. MORE
Economic Methods
Bleg: looking for SAS help
I recently came across the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey, which seems like a fascinating data set. I would like to do some basic cross-tabs of some of the data. However, I am not a SAS jockey. Moreover, some of the cross-tabs I want to do involve linking two of the data sets (doing a table .. MORE
Income Distribution
Income Volatility, Saving, and Risk Pooling
On my earlier post on income volatility, D-aquared asked why smaller risk pools would be efficient? His point is that if the problem is volatility, risk can be diversified away. If 10 families pool their savings, volatility will be lower than if each family saves for itself. The problem with this type of risk pooling .. MORE
Information Goods, Intellectual Property
Why Be Normal?
Economists love to pour cold water on new ideas: “If your plan is so great, why aren’t people already doing it?” And usually we’re right to do so. Most of the economy’s backseat drivers aren’t fit to run an apple cart. But still… There are a lot of ideas that seem to hold up to .. MORE
Austrian Economics
Math and Economics
In a wide-ranging essay, I question the dominance of math in advanced economics. The raising of the mathematical bar in graduate schools over the past several decades has driven many intelligent men and women (perhaps women especially) to pursue other fields. The graduate training process filters out students who might contribute from a perspective of .. MORE
Income Distribution
Income Volatility
The Los Angeles Times reports In the early 1970s, the inflation-adjusted incomes of most families in the middle of the economic spectrum bobbed up and down no more than about $6,500 a year, according to statistics generated by the Los Angeles Times in cooperation with researchers at several major universities. These days, those fluctuations have .. MORE
Regulation and Subsidies
Robin, Radon, and Regulation
When the typical economist tells me about his latest research, my standard reaction is “Eh, maybe.” Then I forget about it. When Robin Hanson tells me about his latest research, my standard reaction is “No way! Impossible!” Then I think about it for years. Case in point: Hanson’s “Warning Labels as Cheap Talk: Why Regulators .. MORE
Behavioral Economics
Layard and Happiness
Richard Layard, the king of “happiness research” is back, and I am not happy. He writes, Divorce and broken homes are ever more common. Research shows that the children of broken homes are more prone to depression in adulthood. To protect children, the state should act to try to make family life more manageable, through .. MORE
Books: Reviews and Suggested Readings
Learning from Lomborg
There’s a reason why Bjorn Lomborg has been rewarded for writing The Skeptical Environmentalist with a pie in the face. The book’s good, very good – and that’s bound to anger the touchy, gloomy Greens he’s debunking. The book has few big surprises for me – I’ve been reading the late great Julian Simon for .. MORE