“Suppose you start a new charity to provide free haircuts for hippies. You only manage to raise the money to pay for three haircuts a year. The Prisoners’ Dilemma might explain why people aren’t more generous with their money in general. But the Prisoners’ Dilemma doesn’t explain why the other charities raise […]
Archive for the 'Myths' Category
Apr18th2012
“Second, the argument that elites are generally opposed to government involvement in the economy reveals the very US-centric focus of Krugman and Wells. Even a perfunctory look at recent or distant history (or at our book!) should have been enough to convince one that in most societies, even in the supposedly laissez-faire 19th century Britain, […]
Feb1st2012
Remember a while back, during the Wisconsin governor Walker fiasco, the debate that raged regarding government workers and their wages with respect to private sector workers? You had right wing economists arguing that federal workers were indeed overpaid and left wing economists arguing the opposite. An honest observer might have found it difficult to know […]
Jan26th2012
Megan McArdle on President Obama’s speech:
I think the speech made it even clearer that other speeches have that the president’s vision of the world is a lightly updated 1950s technocracy without the social conservatism, and with solar panels instead of rocket ships. Government and labor and business working in tightly controlled concert, with nice […]
Dec20th2011
Leftists like to portray the European economic model as more “poor” friendly than the United States economic model. But that depends on what your preferences are: if you are poor and would prefer less disposable income with more government services, then yes, the European model would be preferable. However, if you are poor and would […]
Aug3rd2011
John Taylor, defends his view that post the 1970’s America entered “a period of unprecedented economic stability and growth in the ’80s and ’90s.” He writes:
No one can deny that the 1930s and the 1970s were tough decades for the economy. And job creation in the expansions of the 1980s and 1990s was […]
Jul13th2011
Quote Of The Day
Published by in (modern day) Liberalism, Economics, ModernPolitics, Myths and Taxes. 2 Comments“BTW, progressives like Yglesias often point out that no matter what they say, the GOP is devoted single-mindedly to one goal, and one goal only—lower tax rates for the rich. And I have to agree that that is an obsession of many GOP economists. But then why the strange pattern of state […]
Jul11th2011
Setting The Record Straight On Herbert Hoover
Published by in Economics, Fiscal Stimulus and Myths. 0 CommentsMegan McArdle writes:
Hoover did not tighten up on spending. According to the historical tables of the Office of Management and Budget, spending in 1929 was $3.1 billion, up from $2.9 billion the year before. In 1930 it was $3.3 billion. In 1931, Hoover raised spending to $3.6 billion. And in 1932, […]
Jul6th2011
“I do get the point that if you are young and idealistic and want your work to have a goal of alleviating poverty, working for a typical business may seem unlikely to relate to your objective. But it’s hard to know. Has poverty in India and China been reduced more […]
Jun28th2011
The Freakonomics blog has an interesting perspective:
From a pair of Harvard economists, Alberto Alesina and Nathan Nunn, and a UCLA business school professor, Paola Giuliano, comes this working paper (Abstract here and below; full version here) that tests the hypothesis that current gender role differences can be traced to shifting methods of agriculture, […]
Jun7th2011
“This week, Bloomberg BusinessWeek put the financial woes of the U.S. Postal Service on its cover with a story titled “The End of Mail.” The dire plight of the USPS isn’t exactly news — it’s been losing money since 2006, including nearly $20 billion since 2007. But the cliff the agency has […]
Apr25th2011
“The crack-cocaine sentencing disparities result from racial bias.” In fact, black leaders were the first to sound the alarm about the drug. In 1986, Queens congressman Alton Waldon called on his colleagues to legislate against crack: “For those of us who are black this self-inflicted pain is the worst oppression we have known since slavery. […]
Mar30th2011
“Not only is Smith not endorsing a progressive income tax, he isn’t endorsing any sort of income tax. Reading further into the passage, he successively rejects taxes on income from capital, taxes on wages, and taxes on the income of professionals. The only income he approves of taxing is the income […]
Mar11th2011
“But here’s one failing, that neither Tyler nor Arnold mentions, of the vast majority of both left-wing and market-oriented economists: their apparently dogged determination not to analyze the role of war and an aggressive foreign policy in leading to the rise of the interventionist state. Robert Higgs has laid this […]
Dec22nd2010
Economist David Henderson, in a book review, states oil economics that many environmentalists lack:
Another problem, state Hubbard and Navarro, is that America’s heavy oil dependence makes our economy far more vulnerable to slower growth and recessions triggered by sudden price increases. But because oil is traded in a world market, we are […]
Nov24th2010
“The New York Times invites you to eliminate the federal deficit by picking and choosing among 16 options. I agree with Arnold Kling and David Henderson about the takeaway message: It’s really really easy to cut the deficit to zero without raising taxes. And that’s without even eliminating any […]
