Potpourri
==> The rise of Queen Tatiana… (Come hear her perform in Nashville before she declares herself Empress.)
==> People like to show videos of bullies/thieves “getting theirs” from somebody with a gun, but I prefer this “Les Mis”-esque story of mercy infinitely more.
==> This lady can defeat Ninjas. If you get bored skip a few minutes into the video.
==> Popular Science reviews Porcfest. No mention of me, which is odd for an empirical publication.
==> If this story is accurate, the US “justice system” is even more screwed up than you probably realize.
==> My take on Australia’s carbon tax repeal.
Just to Be Sure Billy Joel Hates Libertarians
A new video featuring “Bitcoin Girl”:
And my own efforts from last year, on a much lower budget:
Krugman’s Kontortions on France
I really wasn’t looking to ding him; I was just doing background to give context to Veronique de Rugy’s interview with Tom Woods. But as I summarized on Twitter: “Krugman: French economy in ’13 shows tax hikes not bad. French economy in ’14 shows austerity awful.” Details here.
The REAL War on Women
My latest at LibertyChat. Excerpts:
Last night I attended the Nashville chapter of “Liberty on the Rocks.” The guest speaker was Maggie McNeill, who runs the blog “The Honest Courtesan” which has the subtitle: “Frank commentary from a retired call girl.” I’m sure many readers might read such a description and have a flood of assumptions, but I must report that McNeill was very eloquent in her talk, and made many points quite similar to standard libertarian ones on drug decriminalization.
…
In conclusion, I would urge readers to consider that government efforts to help young women avoid exploitation in the sex trade may actually be placing them in much greater physical and emotional danger. The last group in the world you want helping desperate women are government officials with guns and cages.
An Honest Comment
From Daniel Usher’s comments on a paper by Kenneth Arrow (both contained in the 1982 Resources for the Future collection, Discounting for Time and Risk in Energy Policy):
“I should confess at once that I do not follow Arrow’s mathematics in detail. Though I think I understand what Arrow is doing, I cannot check his computations and would not be able to spot a mistake; I take it on faith that Arrow’s conclusions follow from him premises.”
The rest of his Comment was pretty good, too.
Such Clever Young Boys
…we economics bloggers are. Noah Smith had a slow news day and responded to me on the “brain worms” stuff. Perhaps I’ll respond, only for the sports entertainment angle.
In the meantime, Twitter is my new medium:
Potpourri
==> Try to imagine the most absurd possible strategy for the police to protect kids from exploitation. Then read this.
==> Don Boudreaux poses a sobering question to Drug Warriors.
==> I can see how the math works, but for some reason this Tabarrok post seems counterintuitive. Anyway, average stock returns aren’t average.
==> In this post someone asked Gene Callahan if it ever bothered him (Gene) that his current political views could have been used to defend slavery, back in the day. Gene responded quite gently to this suggestion in the comments, as you can imagine, thanking the lad for shining a spotlight on Gene’s views and helping him to become a better man. (That’s sarcasm in case you are slow on the uptake.) Then a little more than a week later Gene gave us a Christmas present by starting a post with: “Most of my writing on actual policy issues is merely critical: let’s not try anything too radical, at least all in one step (e.g., abolish the state or abolish capitalists)…” No no, I can’t at all see how someone in 1855 might have used such arguments to oppose the abolitionists. What a cheap shot!
Has Tabarrok Too Been Seduced by the Sumner Side?
In an otherwise exemplary post, Alex writes:
Milton Friedman argued that the Great Depression was caused by a banking collapse that reduced the money stock and decreased velocity leading to a massive failure of aggregate demand that was not countered by the Federal Reserve…Ben Bernanke also put the banking crisis at the center of his story of the Great Depression but the propagation mechanism was quite different…
In an excellent paper from Boom and Bust Banking, Jeff Hummel shows that these two stories have different implications for policy…In Friedman’s story what is required is monetary policy, an increase in the money stock to keep nominal GDP from falling. In Bernanke’s story what is required is actually fiscal policy (albeit fiscal policy performed by the Fed), namely emergency lending to banks to keep credit flowing. [Bold added.]
Uno momento, por favor. Did Milton Friedman actually call for the Fed to increase the stock of money “to keep nominal GDP from falling”? I don’t remember him writing that.
I remember him saying the Fed caused the Great Depression by allowing the money stock to fall by a third in the early 1930s. I remember him saying the Fed should commit to a constant percentage growth in the money stock, no matter what, to take monetary fluctuations off the table.
But I don’t remember even knowing what “nominal GDP” was until Scott Sumner started blogging. Here we have David Beckworth speculating that Milton Friedman, were he alive today, “might have liked a nominal GDP level target.”
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