Economics

Archive for Economics

Intelligently Designed Society

There are Christians who are scientists (I don’t want to use the term “Christian scientists” since it might confuse readers). They think that the wonder, detail, and beauty of nature in their narrow area of study provides yet even more evidence–as if more were needed!–that there is a loving God who created it all. You’re […]

Economists Are So Clever, They Can Make Good Climate News Bad

My latest at IER. My conclusion: To repeat, these researchers at Harvard and other elite institutions are very smart, and they haven’t made a mathematical mistake in their models. But the public should pause and ask if these sophisticated maneuvers match the more populist rhetoric they’ve heard on the issue. When even good news—in the […]

The Wealth-Health Connection

Inefficient regulations can obviously make people poorer, but did you know they can kill? There is actually a whole literature on this. I summarize the key points in my latest IER post. An excerpt: By analyzing consumer behavior, economists can come up with rough estimates of the implied “value of a statistical life” (VSL) that […]

3 Stock Market Tips From an Economist

My latest at FEE. (They picked the title mostly for irony, I think.) You guys think you’ve placed me in a neat little anti-EMH box, don’t you? And then BAM I write something like this: Suppose your brother-in-law says: “I’ve got a great stock tip! I found this company, Acme, that makes fireworks. Let’s wait […]

Potpourri

==> Jeffrey Rogers Hummel on backdoor reserve requirements via Basel. BTW, I don’t like the Alchian & Allen argument that Jeff quotes; I think it gets things backwards when it comes to the function of reserve requirements. But that quibble aside, Jeff is an encyclopedia on the details of central banks. ==> I can’t remember […]

One Last One on Sumner vs. Murphy

I am really going to drop it after this, partly because we have devolved into metal chair bashing, and partly because I plan on doing some technical papers while at Texas Tech, and Scott may be one of the few bloggers who appreciates them… Anyway, in this post Scott first lectures me on how the […]

A Note on Stock Market Volatility

So if I promise to criticize myself, can I get a blogging gig at EconLog? I understand the Efficient Markets Hypothesis, and I think it’s a very good way to take a first crack at the markets. The thing that annoys me about many EMH proponents is that they think they are being empirical and […]

Go Forth and Multiply

My latest at FEE. An excerpt: To illustrate the shortcoming of a naïve natural scientific perspective on these issues, consider an anecdote from my high school years. I remember that my biology textbook asked us to consider a petri dish with a population of bacteria that would double every day. By stipulation, the bacteria would […]