Economics

Archive for Economics

How Does Lucas Differ From Traditional Keynesian Stories on “Money Illusion”?

I sent an email to an expert but thought I’d also post my issue here: For a paper I’m doing, I had to go back and re-read Lucas’ 1972 JET paper on the neutrality of money. In it, he stresses that the agents in his model do not suffer from money illusion. He clarifies what […]

The Recipe for Economic Growth

Abir Doumit relays some of the facts on how countries grow rich. In the beginning it’s standard stuff for most of you, but they get into some things that are not as commonplace. (I think Dan Mitchell of Cato was the lead writer.)

Disrupting the Equilibrium on Rizzo’s Discussion

The March 2017 “Liberty Matters” discussion was very nice, featuring contributions from several Austrian economists who are all my acquaintances/friends. Mario Rizzo was my dissertation chair at NYU. Because my time is brief, I am not going to talk about the more important issues everybody discussed. Instead I am going to quibble with one little […]

An Apparent Contradiction in Economic Analysis of Social Security

I am working on an essay on Social Security reform, and I ran into what at first seemed a contradiction. I actually don’t think there really IS a contradiction, but since I am having fun thinking through it, I wanted to share with the other geeks reading this blog. So right now, a salaried employee […]

Free to Exchange: Salter and Luther on Financial Regulation and Bitcoin

Ben Powell hosts a local public access TV show, but he was out of town so let the inmates run the asylum.

Economists: Spell Out Your Premises

I think this is probably a phenomenon that happens in all disciplines, but I know economics so that’s where I see it. Anyway, while helping some of the Texas Tech grad students study for their qualifiers, I noticed that it’s hard to answer economics questions, when you don’t know what assumptions the professor has in […]

One Last Post on the Trump Carrier Stuff

Following up on this post, let me reframe things in the following way. NOTE: I truly am not posting these thoughts as a, “Nana nana boo boo, what a bunch of hypocrites!” I really just think this is curious/interesting, and so I’m encouraging people to dig through their intuitions and see if they can refine […]

On My Anti-Anti-Trumpism: I Regret Nothing!

Some people in the comments of previous posts have been psychoanalyzing me, wondering why I spend so much of my precious time pointing out hypocrisy in Trump’s critics (as opposed to ridiculing Trump’s ridiculous statements). I actually thought maybe they had a point, and then this happened on Twitter. .@LHSummers Didn't you recommend to new […]