Yearly Archives: 2013

Yanis Varoufakis: Economics Pseudo-Nobel 2013 – An Instinctive Reaction

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Yves here. I was going to say a few words about newly-announced recipients of the award known as the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, but Yanis Varoufakis beat me to the punch. I’ve taken the liberty of combining his two short posts on this topic. Rest assured that as Varoufakis indicates, that Eugene Fama (one of the three recipients of this year’s prize) was one of the leading proponents of the Efficient Market Hypothesis, which as we discussed in ECONNED, provided critical intellectual support for the idea that markets, particularly financial markets, did an excellent job of price determination and thus should be left to their own devices as much as possible.

Seeking Reader Input on Improved Alpha Version of Our Redesign

We’ve made enough changes in the draft website that it seemed like a good idea to seek another round of reader input.

The Shutdown Talks Are in Chaos

A lot of readers, when we’ve discussed the budget/shutdown/debt ceiling negotiations, have done the equivalent of declaring it all to be kabuki, that the fix is in.

While I have no doubt that any resolution of this impasse is certain to make matters worse for what is left of the endangered species known as the American middle class, what is going on in DC is not a pretty scripted stagefight.

Links 10/14/13

David Dayen: Naked Capitalism, the Cure for the Common Ignorance

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By David Dayen, a lapsed blogger, now a freelance writer based in Los Angeles, CA. Follow him on Twitter @ddayen

When the economy collapsed, I was your garden-variety liberal blogger. I obviously recognized that the causes of the recession represented one of the central concerns of our time, and I wanted to learn more of the details. But I had to build an education on these issues largely from scratch. I’ve heard it said that a few years of blogging is worth a master’s degree in public policy. If that’s so, Naked Capitalism is the 3rd-year class everyone wants to take.

Why CEO Pay Will Keep Rising to Even More Insanely Unjustified Levels While Ordinary Workers Get Squeezed

Even casual scrutiny will tell you that the current ridiculous levels of CEO pay bear no relationship to anything other than their highly developed rent extraction skills.

Easy Access to Cannabis is Tempting

The decriminalisation of cannabis is a policy that divides policymakers sharply. This column uses evidence from the Netherlands to show a positive connection between early cannabis use and easy access to cannabis through coffeeshops. The policy implications, however, require further research. Closing coffeeshops could result in some potential users searching in the black market where hard drugs are available as well.

Links 10/13/13

Antidote du jour:

ObamaCare Rollout: What All the Log-In Problems Tell Us About More Serious (and Harder) Problems to Come

By Lambert Strether of Corrente.

Let’s dispose immediately of the administration’s canard that the Federal Exchange’s problems were caused a happy excess of visitors all trying to log in at once; I posted on my encounter with the dreaded security questions bug 38 minutes after the Exchange launched at midnight, October 1. ObamaCare wasn’t marketed like Black Friday, so if a system can’t handle the load at 22 minutes before one in the morning, it can’t handle any load and can’t even have been seriously tested. And let’s not worry about the administration’s transparent attempt to distract us with hit counts from the only metric that really matters: Sign-ups; estimates there range from ~51K at the top to 5K at the bottom; either way, not enough for the PR guys even to try to fake making Obama look good. Or for HHS to release the official figures.

Nathan Tankus: How Naked Capitalism Promotes Important Subversive Thinking

By Nathan Tankus, a student and research assistant at the University of Ottawa. You can follow him on Twitter at @NathanTankus (https://twitter.com/NathanTankus).

If you’re reading this you probably already know a lot about Naked Capitalism. What you may not know is the crucial role it plays in a subculture I’m involved in–that of Heterodox Economics.

Crooks, Liars, Idiots, and Plutocrats

By Matías Vernengo, Associate Professor, Department of Economics, University of Utah. Originally published at Triple Crisis.

Economic historian Carlo Cipolla famously noted that human beings fall into four basic categories: the martyr who takes an action and suffers a loss while producing a gain to others; the genius or prodigy who takes an action by which he/she makes a gain while yielding a gain also to society; the crook (and liar too) who takes an action by which he/she makes a gain causing others a loss; and the stupid person who causes losses to others while deriving no personal gain and even possibly incurring losses. At first glance, the shutdown of the government and the looming debt-ceiling crisis seem to indicate that we are dealing with idiots, the likes of Michele Bachmann, Ted Cruz, Louie Gohmert, Steve King, and other Tea Party Republicans.

Links 10/12/13

The Best Part of This Week

I’ve always been a big believer in the importance of the comments section,. You correct me, give ideas and information, catch typos (aiee!) and make my work and that of the other bloggers better. Your reactions this week took that up a level.

Obamacare Narrow Networks: How They Affect Doctor Specialties

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Lambert here: Most coverage of ObamaCare (ACA) policies available through the Exchanges, especially Democratic-friendly coverage, has focused on the price of polices, rather than their value. This post by Dromaius focuses on value, and shows why the distinction between “in-network” and “out-of-network” coverage is important. At least in the case tested here, insurance companies are shown to “narrow” their networks, and hence coverage available to their policyholders, to exclude specialties like oncology, cardiology, internal medicine, and neurology.