The explosion in mobile phone web usage
13 Jan 2015 Leave a comment
in technological progress Tags: mobile phone usage
A coal mine elevator, 1900
12 Jan 2015 Leave a comment
in economic history, labour economics Tags: The Great Escape, The Great Fact
Great political movies (No36) Hoffa
12 Jan 2015 Leave a comment
in economics
This was indeed a good movie with fine performances by Jack and Danny Devito
Some Ground Rules for the Minimum Wage debate
12 Jan 2015 1 Comment
in econometerics, labour economics, minimum wage Tags: methodology of economics, minimum wage
This is the best single paper I’ve seen written on the methodology of the minimum wage debate.
From a great blog I have just discovered, the author gives a good kicking to both sides for empiricial sloppiness, advocacy bias and plain bad economics. He also explains how to lift your game no matter where you are on the political spectrum.
Naturally, the author, Michael Tontchev, is an economics undergraduate.
My latest article for Turning Point USA. I suggest some aspects of the debate that just need to go away. Your thoughts?
Sloppy Economics and Part-Time Austrians
12 Jan 2015 Leave a comment
in economics
The economy must have been hit harder than expected, given that so many Austrian Economists have switched to being only part-time Austrians, and otherwise thoughtful economists (whether Austrian or not) have shirked their duties.
What am I talking about? I’m talking about two recent waves of libertarian appeals to poor minimum wage empiricism that would not pass the sniff test in an introductory econometrics class.
The first round:
A Kevin Erdmann blog post on the effects of minimum wage on teen employment. Erdmann originally regressed teen employment over time before and after the minimum wage was increased at different times in US history, concluding that there is strong evidence that the minimum wage caused the decrease in the employment trend.
This article was shared by (at least) Steve Horwitz, Peter Boettke, Don Boudreaux, and Mark Perry.
Horwitz introduces the article with
Evidence about the minimum wage harming teen employment…
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Two Thirds of Nordhaus’s 1999 DICE AGW Damages Are Based on Unsubstantiated Guesswork
12 Jan 2015 Leave a comment
in economics
William Nordhaus is one of the top experts on the economics of climate change and for a long time has worked on his series of DICE models (Dynamic Integrated Climate-Economy models) that examine how standard predictions of the effects of climate change on climate variables (such as global mean temperature) will impact the economy. His work is important because DICE is one of the three Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs) of climate-economic interaction that the government’s Interagency Working Group on Social Cost of Carbon uses in its analysis of the impacts of climate change. In other words, DICE is one of the three models used to calculate the Social Cost of Carbon (SCC), which is meant to represent the damage caused by one additional ton of CO2 in the atmosphere. The SCC was devised so that the government could weigh different strategies to slow down CO2 emissions and (in theory) reject…
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Classic Books in Business and Economic History
12 Jan 2015 Leave a comment
in economics
This is an excellent list.
| Peter Klein |
EH.Net’s Project 2000/2001 features new reviews of classic works in business and economic history. Here are some that may be of particular interest to O&M readers:
- David Landes on Chandler’s The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business
- Thomas McCraw on Schumpeter’s Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy
- Stanley Engerman on Weber’s Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
- Cynthia Taft Morris on Davis and North’s Institutional Change and American Economic Growth
- Paul Hohenberg on Landes’s The Unbound Prometheus: Technological Change and Industrial Development in Western Europe from 1750 to the Present
- Winifred Rothenberg on Horwitz’s The Transformation of American Law
- Albert Fishlow on Gerschenkron’s Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective
- Philip Coelho on North and Thomas’s The Rise of the Western World: A New Economic History
Frozen Niagara Falls, 1911
12 Jan 2015 Leave a comment
Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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