The haters love to claim that people like me view more demand, more money printing, as the solution to all problems. But of course that’s not true. Aggregate demand won’t solve a problem of low productivity, or inadequate productive capacity, or for that matter extreme inequality due to technology or market power. But it can… Continue reading Untitled
Yglesias: The American economy is simultaneously overregulated and underregulated
Yglesias: The American economy is simultaneously overregulated and underregulated
The way I would put this is that the American economy is simultaneously overregulated and underregulated. It is much too difficult to get business and occupational licenses…Business licensing is different. “This city has too many restaurants to choose from” is not a real public policy problem, it’s only a problem for incumbent restauranteurs who don’t want to face competition.
In a nutshell, regulations can make sense in the case of information asymmetry and in cases of negative externality. They usually don’t make sense as price controls. And in many cases, business and occupational licenses, taxi medallions, street vendor quotas and the like act as defacto price controls.
The Baffling Economics of Thomas the Tank Engine
The Baffling Economics of Thomas the Tank Engine
The Island of Sodor has a major comparative advantage: the best artificial intelligence researchers in the world. AI research on the Island of Sodor is massively ahead of the rest of the world. The trains on Sodor have been designed to understand natural language, solve problems for themselves, recognize new situations, and even have emotions and personalities.
Worth a read. Follow this over to the Forbes article and read that as well.
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snow on a half frozen lake on Flickr.
The Nordic countries: The next supermodel
The Nordic countries: The next supermodel
The Nordics cluster at the top of league tables of everything from economic competitiveness to social health to happiness. They have avoided both southern Europe’s economic sclerosis and America’s extreme inequality. Development theorists have taken to calling successful modernisation “getting to Denmark”.
Colin Powell asks O’Reilly: Why do you only see me as an African-American?
Colin Powell asks O’Reilly: Why do you only see me as an African-American?
Did Powell ask for %$#ing Ice Tea? That might explain it.
Is State Capitalism Winning?
In the age-old contest of economic-growth models, state capitalism has seemed to be gaining the upper hand in recent years. Avatars of liberal capitalism like the United States and the United Kingdom continued to perform anemically in 2012, while many Asian countries, relying on various versions of dirigisme, have not only grown rapidly and steadily over the last several decades, but have also weathered recent economic storms with surprising grace. So, is it time to update the economics textbooks?
Not an easy read, but worth reading.
If you’re 27 or younger, you’ve never experienced a colder-than-average month
If you’re 27 or younger, you’ve never experienced a colder-than-average month
But it was cold here, in winter, therefore no climate change. What trend?
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Outside that bubble, a fair number of people have noticed that Keynesian economics has performed spectacularly in the crisis — it successfully predicted that deficits wouldn’t drive up interest rates, that monetary expansion wouldn’t be inflationary, that austerity policies in Britain and elsewhere would hit economic growth. And no, don’t tell me that Keynesians predicted… Continue reading Untitled
U.N. Drone Investigator Might Be a Deadly Robot’s Worst Nightmare
U.N. Drone Investigator Might Be a Deadly Robot’s Worst Nightmare
That carries the possibility of a reckoning with the human damage left by drones, the first such witnessing by the international community. Accountability, Emmerson tells Danger Room in a Monday phone interview, “is the central purpose of the report.”
So, will the administration agree to UN inspections?