“Trapped” in Rental Contracts
28 Sep 2014 Leave a comment
in economics
| Peter Klein |
In today’s feature on the US housing market, an NPR correspondent sadly notes that foreclosure victims are “trapped” in rentals. Why, those poor, unlevered souls, choosing to purchase a flow of housing services over time, rather than buying a huge, illiquid housing asset outright, using borrowed funds. Tragic!
It made me think of similar tragedies:
- Mercedes and BMW drivers trapped in lease contracts, rather than buying their cars with cash or credit
- Individuals trapped in wage and salary contracts, rather than raising the capital, arranging the inputs, and bearing the uncertainties to be sole proprietors
- Companies trapped in outsourcing agreements, rather than owning all upstream and downstream production processes directly, as vertically integrated firms
- Vacationers trapped in resort hotels, rather than owning their own vacation condos or timeshares
- Readers trapped by downloading and reading books on their Kindles, essentially “renting” them from Amazon, rather than buying…
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Robots will take my job alert: when musicians campaigned against the introduction of canned music into cinemas
28 Sep 2014 Leave a comment
in economics of media and culture, human capital, industrial organisation, labour economics, labour supply, survivor principle, technological progress Tags: automation, creative destruction, mechanisation, technological unemployment, The Great Enrichment
The reality of green investing
28 Sep 2014 Leave a comment
in environmental economics, environmentalism, financial economics Tags: green investing
Research Findings That Don’t Surprise Me
28 Sep 2014 Leave a comment
in economics
| Peter Klein |
The Institutional Causes of China’s Great Famine, 1959-61
Xin Meng, Nancy Qian, Pierre Yared
NBER Working Paper No. 16361, September 2010This paper investigates the institutional causes of China’s Great Famine. It presents two empirical findings: 1) in 1959, when the famine began, food production was almost three times more than population subsistence needs; and 2) regions with higher per capita food production that year suffered higher famine mortality rates, a surprising reversal of a typically negative correlation. A simple model based on historical institutional details shows that these patterns are consistent with the policy outcomes in a centrally planned economy in which the government is unable to easily collect and respond to new information in the presence of an aggregate shock to production.
It is said that when the Nobel Prize in economics was first established, prizes were given for using economics to teach people…
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The Guardian criticises Peer Review – Open Review yields, with the help of bloggers, better discovery of scientific flaws
28 Sep 2014 Leave a comment
in economics
Bill Easterly on the great dangers of evidence-based policy and field trials
28 Sep 2014 Leave a comment
Ron Radosh » The American Left: Friends of Our Country’s Enemies
27 Sep 2014 Leave a comment
in liberalism, war and peace Tags: Can there be a decent Left, Leftover Left, The superiority of Western civilisation
The American Left used to be patriotic. In its heyday, Eugene V. Debs never attacked America, and the socialist vision he advocated was in his eyes a way to realize the promise of America.
As for the American Communist Party, in reality the tool of Stalin’s USSR, it pretended in the 1940s to be pro-American, and its chairman, Earl Browder, coined the slogan “Communism is 20th century Americanism.” This pretence came to an end during the Cold War, when the Left supported the Soviet bloc and all of its policies, and argued that America was in the process of becoming a nascent fascist state.
The remnants of the ’60s New Left identified with America’s new enemies, especially North Vietnam, Communist Cuba, the PLO, and, in the ’80s, Sandinista Nicaragua. After 9/11, many of its adherents took the position that the United States had the terror attack coming to it, since the perpetrators had taken 3000 lives in protest against America’s imperial ambitions and control.
This led Michael Walzer, the social-democratic intellectual, to pen an article called “Can There Be a Decent Left?” Walzer courageously took on many of those on his side of the spectrum, hitting them for accepting the “blame America first” doctrine to explain foreign policy defeats; for not criticizing any peoples or nations in the Third World; for believing in what he called “rag-tag Marxism”; for failing to oppose dangerous jihadists and Islamist states; and for refusing to blame anyone else for the world’s wrong except the United States.
I wonder what Walzer would write today if he examined his article anew. If one looks around at the Left’s response to Hamas’ actions in Gaza and its attacks on Israel, and its view of Islamist fascism in countries like Iran, Syria and among the ISIS forces seeking to take over Iraq, it is clearer than ever that the Left has one function — to support the enemies of democracy.
Operating in the United States, Britain and France, the Western Left takes the opportunity to speak freely in the democracies in which they live, to openly support and express their solidarity with democracy’s most fervent enemies.
via Ron Radosh » The American Left: Friends of Our Country’s Enemies.
Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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