The Bullet that Started WWI
02 Aug 2022 Leave a comment
in defence economics, war and peace Tags: World War I
Evolution, Sex & Desire | David Buss | The JBP Podcast
02 Aug 2022 Leave a comment
in discrimination, economic history, economics of crime, economics of education, gender, human capital, labour economics, law and economics Tags: evolutionary biology, evolutionary psychology
Green washing
02 Aug 2022 Leave a comment
in energy economics, environmental economics, global warming, transport economics Tags: electric cars, expressive voting, renewable energy
How One Man Stole a Central Bank
02 Aug 2022 Leave a comment
in business cycles, economic history, economics of crime, law and economics, macroeconomics, monetary economics Tags: crime and punishment, monetary policy
How Tunneling in New York is Easier Than Elsewhere
01 Aug 2022 Leave a comment
I hate the term “apples-to-apples.” I’ve heard those exact three words from so many senior people at or near New York subway construction in response to any cost comparison. Per those people, it’s inconceivable that if New York builds subways for $2 billion/km, other cities could do it for $200 million/km. Or, once they’ve been convinced that those are the right costs, there must be some justifiable reason – New York must be a uniquely difficult tunneling environment, or its size must mean it needs to build bigger stations and tunnels, or it must have more complex utilities than other cities, or it must be harder to tunnel in an old, dense industrial metropolis. Sometimes the excuses are more institutional but always drawn to exculpate the political appointees and senior management – health benefits are a popular excuse and so is a line like “we care about worker rights/disability rights…
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Lucas and Sargent on Optimization and Equilibrium in Macroeconomics
01 Aug 2022 Leave a comment
In a famous contribution to a conference sponsored by the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, Robert Lucas and Thomas Sargent (1978) harshly attacked Keynes and Keynesian macroeconomics for shortcomings both theoretical and econometric. The econometric criticisms, drawing on the famous Lucas Critique (Lucas 1976), were focused on technical identification issues and on the dependence of estimated regression coefficients of econometric models on agents’ expectations conditional on the macroeconomic policies actually in effect, rendering those econometric models an unreliable basis for policymaking. But Lucas and Sargent reserved their harshest criticism for abandoning what they called the classical postulates.
Economists prior to the 1930s did not recognize a need for a special branch of economics, with its own special postulates, designed to explain the business cycle. Keynes founded that subdiscipline, called macroeconomics, because he thought that it was impossible to explain the characteristics of business cycles within the discipline imposed…
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The Depressing Reincarnation of Build Back Better
01 Aug 2022 Leave a comment
One of the best things about 2021 was the fact that Congress did not approve Joe Biden’s economically debilitating plan to raise taxes and expand the welfare state.
His so-called Build Back Better plan was a very bad mix of class-warfare tax policy and redistributionist spending policy.
But one of the worst things about 2022 may be the reincarnation of a slimmed-down version of Biden’s plan.
Simply stated, the “slimmed-down version” of a terrible piece of legislation is bad news – even if it is possible to envision something even worse.
The Wall Street Journal‘s editorial on the package illustrates why it is bad news that Senator Joe Manchin is trying to rescue Biden’s statist agenda.
As the economy slouches near recession, Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin…unveiled a tax-and-spending deal that they call the Inflation Reduction Act.
Is their aim to reduce inflation…
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Reviewing Covid monetary policy – Part 1
01 Aug 2022 Leave a comment
After last week’s posts on the Reserve Bank’s handling of monetary policy, I thought it might be worthwhile to stand back and attempt a series of posts this week on how the Reserve Bank has handled things (mainly monetary policy) over the two and half years since, in late January 2020, Covid became an economic issue for New Zealand. In today’s post, I will look at the Bank’s preparedness and their responses over the first three months or so. In a second post, probably tomorrow, I will look at their handling of policy over the following year or so, and a third post will look at the more recent period. If it seems worthwhile, I might attempt a final post bringing it all together.
It is hardly a secret that I do not have a high regard for the Governor, but in this series I will be seeking to offer…
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This high-speed rail project is a warning for the US
01 Aug 2022 Leave a comment
in economics of bureaucracy, environmental economics, politics - USA, Public Choice, transport economics, urban economics Tags: megaprojects
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