According to The Everyday Economist, a PhD student at Wayne State University, Keynes gets a bad rap as far as his so-called General Theory is concerned. It sounds quite alluring:
Each businessman has his own subjective expectations of future profitability and other business conditions. If these expectations are pessimistic, businesses will invest less and therefore [...]
Author Archive for Admiral
Yes, I like to take a few moments every day and recall Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, and Douglas MacArthur. Today, Drudge Report handed my Thatcher moment to me so that I did not have to search long. From my favorite writer, Peggy Noonan, an excerpt in the Wall Street Journal:
And there is Margaret Hilda Roberts. [...]
Well, we have our answer about whether the upgrade from version 2.0.4 to 2.0.11 works. It doesn’t. Back to the drawing board.
The Threat to Economics, Part II
Published by May 22nd, 2008 in Economics, Policy and Technology & Innovation. 3 CommentsThe best of economics concerns itself with answering what, how, and why questions. Here are some examples: why does the quantity demanded of Wild Cherry Pepsi increase when the price goes down? How are people’s investments affected by raising the capital gains tax rate? What does this person prefer to produce? Answering questions such as [...]
On Awkward Utopia, we have recently discussed how robust the results have been from the so-called science of monetarism. I think that as far as it goes, the jury may still be out, though some authors on this blog would concur with the Austrians that the science of monetarism will only be whole once the [...]
The Politics of (Monetary Policy) Science, Part II
Published by May 15th, 2008 in Economics, International Affairs and Policy. 2 CommentsNo sooner do I publish a post about the politics of monetary policy than does Joseph Stiglitz make waves with a post that directly contradicts substantial portions of my post. It is therefore worth a cursory survey of his claims. Stiglitz is going for shock value at the outset of this column, where he writes:
The [...]
New subsidies for salmon farmers! Aquanomics properly says Congress has acted “in its infinite stupidity.“
The Politics of (Monetary Policy) Science, Part I
Published by May 14th, 2008 in Economics, Policy and Technology & Innovation. 2 CommentsEconomics is widely considered a science, up to a point. What kind of a science is an issue still up for debate. Some believe it merely a “social” science, and it is, though it is much more than any of the other social sciences. In particular, it seems that microeconomics forms the basis for the [...]
Breaking up Teachers unions is apparently the main reason behind success in New Orleans’ public education resurgence.
Theory of Price Notes, Part II: The Decision to Hold
Published by May 13th, 2008 in Economics. 0 CommentsStigler has the endearing quality that he is amenable to adding the spice of humor to many economics concepts. He does so with examples of economics phenomena or in wry commentary. One of the concepts that this book has hammered home, that I have far too often ignored (and I think we have only mentioned [...]
Theory of Price Notes, Part I: Tastes
Published by May 12th, 2008 in Economics, Entertainment & Culture and History. 7 CommentsRecently, I visited the subterranean area of Library West where the good old fashioned economics texts are located. Fellow UES luminaries accompanied me. I checked out several books that will make for interesting summer reading. Among them was The Theory of Price, 4th Ed. (1987) by the late George Stigler, a renowned Nobel prize-winning University [...]
AEA: Understanding School Performance
Published by May 11th, 2008 in Education and Policy. 0 Comments[Note: I started typing this post in January but lost interest in it; so I am pushing it out now.]
From several potentially very interesting sessions on the early morning of the first day of AEA 2008, I picked the “Understanding School Performance” discussion because it related to the UES summer mission of working on a [...]
Leonard Mlodinow, who has a career but is best known for co-writing Star Trek: The Next Generation’s “The Drumhead,” argues that luck means more than we think and thinks Twain is 110% right that “People commonly use statistics like a drunk uses a lamp post: for support rather than illumination”?
[ Sorry I cannot write a dignified post like Matt at this time... I will be back in a few days with a series of posts on intellectual property. In the meantime, I will fulminate against my favorite target: the Democrats! It's election season everyone! ]
In what could be the first of many such laws, [...]
We have just completed our first day of AEA sessions and there is much to report. We heard things in our sessions both to shock and amaze.