The Red White and Blue Pill
Detroit was creatively destroyed by creative destruction
free-market enthusiasts love to quote Joseph Schumpeter about the inevitability of “creative destruction” — but they and their audiences invariably picture themselves as being the creative destroyers, not the creatively destroyed. Well, guess what: Someone always ends up being the modern equivalent of a buggy-whip producer, and it might be you.
Alan Greenspan was wrong about everything, hasn’t changed mind.
Brad De Long digs up an op-ed from 2010, three years ago, written by Alan Greenspan. And he was wrong about everything. So…will this change his mind about anything? Doubtful.
Jack Welch versus Milton Friedman
On the face of it, shareholder value is the dumbest idea in the world. Shareholder value is a result, not a strategy… your main constituencies are your employees, your customers and your products. Managers and investors should not set share price increases as their overarching goal… Short-term profits should be allied with an increase in the long-term value of a company.
Welch basically invalidating the theory of the firm, inspired by Friedman.
Registered nurses have more modest incomes than doctors, but are shown to be far more likely to buy generic pain relievers than other people with similar incomes. Most strikingly of all, professional pharmacists—the people who know which pills are which—are even less likely to buy name brand than are doctors and nurses. This all strongly suggests that rich people avoid generics not because the pills are inferior, or even because they’re showing off, but simply because they’re careless.
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Nobody I know thinks advertising works on them or on anyone else. But it’s clear that even when marketers don’t have any meaningful information to convey about why you should buy their product, investments in branding nonetheless move purchasing decisions.
The Carbon Tax:Economists Have A One-Page Solution To Climate Change
This is why economists love a carbon tax: One change to the tax code and the entire economy shifts to reduce carbon emissions. No complicated regulations. No rules for what kind of gas mileage cars have to get or what specific fraction of electricity has to come from wind or solar or renewables. That’s by and large the way we do it now. Reilly says the current web of rules is a more complicated and more expensive way of getting the same outcome as a carbon tax. … Reilly says, you can reduce, say, income tax to balance out the new taxes people are paying for carbon emissions. People pay more for gas, but they get to keep more of their income. I called around and talked to a bunch of economists about this, and they said the basic idea was sound: If you give the carbon-tax money back by cutting income taxes, you can probably offset a lot of the pain.
My problem with the carbon tax, versus Cap-and-Trade is that with a carbon tax, it goes directly to consumers. Who are just as likely to vote for people who promise the cut the carbon tax without offsets as they are to vote for people who promise to cut income taxes without offsets.
The American Dream isn’t dead. It’s just moved to Denmark.
The argument that we should tolerate growing inequality because of our great mobility is based on fiction. We have growing inequality and shrinking mobility.
Krugman: Where Are The Deficit Celebrations?
For three years and more Beltway politics has been all about the deficit. Urgent action was needed to avert crisis. A Grand Bargain absolutely had to be reached. Fix the Debt, now now now!
So where are the celebrations now that the debt issue looks, if not solved, at least greatly mitigated? And it’s not just recovering revenues: health costs, the biggest driver of long-run spending, have slowed dramatically
Maybe they didn’t actually care about debt and deficit? Maybe the people who said nothing while W grew the debt don’t care about fiscal issues at all. They care about cutting the parts of the state that provide services for the bottom 99% and transferring that wealth to the top 1%
Krugman: Not Everything Is Political
in practice it turns out that many conservatives are unwilling to concede that Keynesian macro has any validity to it, or that you can sometimes run the printing presses without unleashing runaway inflation, because they fear that any such admission would open the doors to much wider government intervention. But that’s exactly my point! They’re letting their views about how the world works be dictated by their vision of the kind of society they want; they’re politicizing their economic analysis. And that’s why they keep getting everything wrong.
This is why we can not have a policy discussion. Because one side doesn’t care about how the world actually works, only the kind of world they wish to live in.
Conservatives Had Better Hope George W. Bush Was a Dummy
if conservatives want us to believe that the United States blundered through a major terrorist attack, two major failed military adventures, dismal economic performance, and then finally an epic economic collpase all while under the watch of a very bright and attentive leader then it seems like a much deeper failure of the movement.