Yesterday, we featured a post from Dani Rodrik which observed that free trade doesn’t necessarily lower prices (it will lower prices of imports and increase prices of exports, so it depends on the mix of goods purchased). What is interesting about the debate that unfolded is that it tells us something not just about free […]
Read more...This is a nice post from Dani Rodrik. The short answer is it depends. Free trade increases the price of export goods and lowers the price of imports: [A]nyone who understands comparative advantage knows that free trade affects relative prices, not the price level (the latter being the province of macro and monetary factors). When […]
Read more...Australian economist John Quiggin posted a high level event chart of the how Seriously Bad scenarios might play themselves out (from a talk by sustainability expert Chris Moran) and what the policy response might be. It includes probability estimates from 80 students. However, as the chart shows, the rational calculus doesn’t bode well for forestalling […]
Read more...This post comes from a Frank de Libero, reader at Angry Bear. By way of background, not only are some of the main writers at Angry Bear pretty serious statisticians, but they attract them as readers, and Libero appears to be one. Libero does a quick and dirty analysis of employment versus various ways to […]
Read more...Alan Reynolds has become income inequality’s analogue to a global warming denier. Even after Fed chairman Ben Bernanke and President Bush have acknowledged that income disparity has increased, Reynolds is still fighting a rearguard action. He wrote a series of articles, starting with a Wall Street Journal comment last December, arguing against the widely-cited finding […]
Read more...As we’ve discussed, in the UK there is a move afoot to include the concept of wellbeing in public policy debates. The Brits have recognized that alienation and anomie are on the rise and are willing to discuss whether government can be part of the solution, or at least not part of the problem. While […]
Read more...Ah, but it’s a good rant, colorful and defensibly reasoned, by Angry Bear reader OldVet, “Taking the other side of Trade – what’s free and what’s not.” He makes a valid core observation: free trade hasn’t delivered the goods (at least for the US) that it was alleged to, and that is at least in […]
Read more...After all the excitment in the markets, some comic relief is in order, which we found thanks to The Big Picture. You can find more background information here.
Read more...An interesting story by David Leonhardt in the New York Times, “Amid Ivy, a Battle About the Climate,” on a bit of dueling among economists about the Stern Report. By way of background, the Stern Report was prepared by Sir Nicholas Stern for the UK government, and was the first attempt by an economist to […]
Read more...Below we have an extended except from “The Road to Happiness” by Derek Draper in The Guardian’s online commentary section. I find it intriguing that the question of social wellbeing has come to the point of being worthy of consideration in the House of Commons. Americans are stereotyped as touchy-feely and navel-gazing, but the Brits […]
Read more...Well, that isn’t exactly what he says, but close. Martin Wolf, the Financial Times’ chief economics editor, in his February 6 commentary, “In spite of sceptics, it is worth reducing climate risk,” says that economists are the big skeptics about global warming, and the possible consequences are too dire for them to continue to take […]
Read more...An excellent post by Mark Thoma in his Economist’s View, which although it was prompted by a post about Ayn Rand, could just have easily been in response to the New York Times’ lead story today, “In Washington, Contractors Play Biggest Role Ever.” Thoma discusses what markets are good for (efficiency, not equity), and what […]
Read more...So says this post in AllAboutAlpha which cites a report by James Montier, a Kleinwort Benson economist, which in turn cites a good deal of impressive academic work from folks like Eugene Fama (a University of Chicago professor and one of the luminaries of modern finance). Now why is this important? Well, much of how […]
Read more...A thoughtful essay by Paul Krugman in the New York Review of Books titled,”Who Was Milton Friedman?” This excerpt gives a sense of the piece: In his 1965 review of Friedman and Schwartz’s Monetary History, the late Yale economist and Nobel laureate James Tobin gently chided the authors for going too far. “Consider the following […]
Read more...In an interesting bit of synchronicity, an Economist piece today on the advances and limitations of economics as a discipline contrasts with a news item on the pseudo science of certain types of hucksterism, eh, modeling. The Economist’s Free Exchange section discusses the limitations of the dismal science in being able to assess the possible […]
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