Intergenerational mobility in 1 chart
20 Nov 2014 Leave a comment
in applied welfare economics, human capital, labour economics, occupational choice, politics - USA, Rawls and Nozick Tags: intergenerational mobility
Steven Landsburg on the difference between an absurdity and a lie about Obamacare
20 Nov 2014 Leave a comment
in applied price theory, applied welfare economics, health economics, politics - USA
The New York Times announces the Death of Snow
20 Nov 2014 Leave a comment
in climate change, environmental economics, environmentalism, politics - USA Tags: climate alarmism, global warming
Jon Stewart demolishes Gruber and the Democrats on Obamacare
20 Nov 2014 Leave a comment
in applied price theory, applied welfare economics, economics, economics of regulation, health economics, politics - USA Tags: health insurance, Jon Stewart, Obamacare
US corporate earnings vs. European corporate earnings
19 Nov 2014 Leave a comment
in Euro crisis, great recession, macroeconomics, politics - USA Tags: Euroland, GFC, great recession
The great stagnation continues
19 Nov 2014 Leave a comment
in global financial crisis (GFC), great recession, politics - USA Tags: GFC, Great Deviation, The Great Recession
Economic freedom in America and Scandinavia, excluding taxes
17 Nov 2014 Leave a comment
in international economics, macroeconomics, politics - USA Tags: capitalism and freedom, capitalism and prosperity, Trans-Atlantic gap
The 47% is bigger than you think
16 Nov 2014 2 Comments
in politics - USA, public economics, Rawls and Nozick Tags: 47%, tax incidence, who pays taxes
What if We’re Looking at Inequality the Wrong Way? – NYTimes.com
16 Nov 2014 Leave a comment
in applied welfare economics, entrepreneurship, human capital, labour economics, labour supply, liberalism, Marxist economics, occupational choice, politics - USA, poverty and inequality, public economics, Rawls and Nozick, technological progress Tags: Piketty, poverty and inequality
What Obama and China intend to do by around 2030
14 Nov 2014 Leave a comment
in environmental economics, global warming, politics - USA Tags: climate alarmism, expressive voting, global warming
HT: Catallaxyfiles
George Stigler vindicated: Learning the Wealth of Nations
14 Nov 2014 Leave a comment
in constitutional political economy, political change, politics - Australia, politics - New Zealand, politics - USA, Public Choice Tags: george stigler, Leftover Left, Milton Friedman, neoliberal conspiracies, public choice, Twitter left, Tyler Cowen
Tyler Cowen has drawn attention to a 2011 paper on policy learning in the 1970s and 80s by Francisco J. Buera, Alexander Monge-Narajo, and Giorgio E. Primiceri was published in Econometrica in 2011. Their paper found that:
1. Policymakers have priors about how good the market economy is, and they revise those views — and thus revise policy — as they observe their own growth results and those of their neighbors.
2. A simple learning model predicts about 97% of the policy choices observed in the data. The model accounts for more than 77% of the observed policy switches over a three-year time window.
3. Evolving beliefs — and not just the fixed demographic characteristics of countries — are critical for understanding policy decisions.
4. It was probably the growth collapse of the late 1970s for interventionist countries which led to a greater reliance on markets.
5. Adjustment toward better-performing policies is often quite slow. In part this is because policymakers attribute the superior performance of other countries to heterogeneity rather than policy per se.
This record of politicians learning from failure and success at home and abroad is a vindication of George Stigler’s views of the relative unimportance of economists in influencing public policy.
There was no neoliberal conspiracy that captured the hearts and minds of politicians through mass hypnosis in the 1970s and 1980s as both the Left over Left and the Twitter Left like to suggest
The policies of Friedman had to wait, as George Stigler predicted, for a market to develop among interest groups and the voting public. Once that market developed, Milton Friedman, FA Hayek and others looked like leaders of an opinion.
A few years earlier, Friedman and Hayek were just angry men in the wilderness.
The reason for this sudden change in their public profile and purported influence on the shape the course of public policy in th 1970s and 1980s onwards was political parties were yet to conclude that the existing policy regime had failed irretrievably, and that the successes of neighbours on economic reform might be worth imitating locally.
Once politicians, the voting public and interest groups concluded that new solutions are needed, just as Stigler predicted, the ideas for reform been around for a long time came to the front.
via http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2014/11/learning-the-wealth-of-nations.html
The Twitter Left is replacing the Left over Left
14 Nov 2014 Leave a comment
in comparative institutional analysis, liberalism, Marxist economics, politics, politics - Australia, politics - New Zealand, politics - USA, technological progress Tags: Leftover Left, Twitter left
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