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One common concern or complaint about studying economics is that by taking the position that people make choices and respond to incentives, the discipline is in effect advocating that people pursue self-interest–rather than just acknowledging that in many contexts, from looking for a higher-paid job to buying what’s on sale at the grocery, people do … Continue reading Maybe Studying Economics Does Not Make You Selfish
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Social scientists and policy analysts often work with numbers. But for the rest of humanity–including, say, voters–the numbers may not mean much. Ed Leamer is a prominent econometrician, which means that among other virtues he knows how the quantitative games are played. Way back in 1983, in a now-classic article called “Let’s Take the Con … Continue reading Leamer on Economic Knowledge: Pictures, Stories, Numbers
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I mostly encounter two reasons for learning about the economy or anything else: either it helps you to get a better job, or it helps you to advocate better policies. However, I have been writing this blog in May 2011.  Any tidbits of job-relevant material have been unintentional. While I do sometimes offer policy-relevant commentary, … Continue reading Thoughts on the Virtues of (Economic) Understanding
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Housing affordability is an issue in cities around the world, and Albert Saiz performs yeoman’s work in pulling together a wide range of policy options and examples from many cities and countries in “The Global Housing Affordability Crisis: Policy Options and Strategies” (IZA Policy Paper No. 203, October 2023). It’s nearly impossible to summarize the … Continue reading Housing Affordability Policy Options: Dutch Rental Housing Associations
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Although the overall purpose of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962 is captured by the title of the legislation, it also included some loopholes. One of the most infamous is Section 232, allow the president to impose tariffs on an imported product when it is "being imported into the United States in such quantities or … Continue reading National Security as an Excuse for Tariffs: Garlic and Scissors
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Robert Solow (1924-2023) died last week. As a starting point for understanding his life and his work on growth theory, the Nobel prize website, since he won the award in 1987, includes an overall description, a biographical essay, and his Nobel lecture. I can also strongly recommend an interview that Steven Levitt carried out with … Continue reading Solow on Market Advantages and Market Failures
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There’s a sort of parlor game that the economically-minded sometimes play around the Christmas holiday, related to A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens. Was Dickens writing his story as an attack on economics, capitalism, and selfishness? After all, his depiction of Ebenezer Scrooge, along with his use of phrases like “decrease the surplus population” and the … Continue reading Charles Dickens on Management and Labor
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Charles Dickens wrote what has become one of the iconic stories of Christmas day and Christmas spirit in A Christmas Carol. But of course, the experiences of Ebenezer Scrooge are a story, not a piece of reporting. Here’s a piece by Dickens written for the weekly journal Household Words that he edited from 1850 to 1859. It’s from the … Continue reading Charles Dickens on Seeing Poverty
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The group of technologies that go under the name of “carbon capture and storage” involve taking carbon out of the air directly. Oddly enough, some interest groups who express the strongest concerns about the risks of climate change often make ambivalent or even negative comments about this technology, I suspect because they fear that a … Continue reading Carbon Capture and Storage: Where It Stands
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The Hart-Scott-Rodino Antitrust Improvements Act of 1976 requites that all mergers above a certain size–now $101 million–must be reported to the federal government before they occur. This gives the authorities at the Federal Trade Commission and the Antitrust Division at the US Department of Justice a chance to challenge mergers, if and when warranted. The … Continue reading The Merger Surge of 2021 and 2022
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Back in 1790, when Congress was arguing about process for the first Census, one argument was that the Census should limit itself to counting heads, for purposes of determining how many representatives each state should receive. But James Madison argued that it was important to seize the opportunity of the Census to gather additional information, … Continue reading When Fewer People Answer Surveys, What Should Government Statisticians Do?
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David A. Price of the Richmond Fed carries out an interview titled “Angus Deaton: On deaths of despair, randomized controlled trials, and winning the Nobel Prize” (Econ Focus: Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, Fourth Quarter 2023, pp. 18-22). Here are a few of Deaton’s comments that caught my eye: On his shift from “cosmopolitan prioritarianism” to … Continue reading Interview with Angus Deaton: Critiques of Cosmopolitan Prioritarianism and Randomized Control Trials
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. Is the rise in US health care spending slowing down? For perspective, health care spending as a share of GDP had been rising steadily over the half-century prior to 2010: 5% of GDP in 1960, 6.9% of GDP in 1970, 8.9% of GDP in 1980, 12.1% of GDP in 1990, 13.3% of GDP in … Continue reading Is Healthcare Spending Leveling Out at Last?
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When thinking about converting values from the distant past or the distant future to the present, the actual values themselves are often considerably less important than what is called the “discount rate”–that is, the annual percentage rate at which you do the conversion from past or future to the present. An example of converting future … Continue reading Caring about the Distant Future and Past: Social Discount Rates
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The Program for International Student Assessment, commonly known as PISA, tests 15 year-olds (that is, mostly 10th-graders in the US) on reading, mathematics, and science literacy. It is done about every three years, and coordinated across 81 countries by the OECD. It’s high-level data for cross-country comparisons of what students know. The 2022 results are … Continue reading The Learning of US 15 Year-Olds in International Context: 2022 PISA Scores
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