Economics

Archive for Economics

City of Houston Subpoenas Pastors’ Sermons

I saw several people denouncing this on social media, and I assumed they were exaggerating. But no, the city of Houston has been subpoenaing local pastors for written copies of their sermons. As the Houston Chronicle explains: Houston’s embattled equal rights ordinance took another legal turn this week when it surfaced that city attorneys, in […]

One More Point on Krugman vs. Gross on QE2

I’m like Columbo. I notice just a slight turn of phrase that other investigators would consider innocuous, yet I realize it shines a spotlight on the killer. Remember: Krugman is now saying that Gross et al. were wrong about QE2 because they suffer “liquidity trap denial” (his actual term lately). That is, these people were […]

Are the Republicans Good on the Free Market?

We already know the Democrats aren’t really the party of peace…turns out the Republicans aren’t laissez-faire champions either. I feel so disillusioned. The intro: In my last post, I challenged the conventional view that the Democratic Party was the dovish one, in contrast to those hawkish Nixon Wage PriceRepublicans. I pointed out that Democrats had […]

Can the Central Bank Control Interest Rates?

I argue yes, within limits. The weird thing is that I think everybody in this dispute agrees on the caveats, we just summarize the reality in totally opposite ways (i.e. “yes” vs. “no”).

Russ Roberts Has Nothing For Which to Apologize

Adam Ozimek launches this odd complaint against RR: He’s an economist who regularly complains that economics is less scientific than it thinks, and says things like he doesn’t think economists really know what much more about the world than we did 50 years ago. But then Russ also has perhaps the best economics podcast in […]

Economic Fallacies 1 of 4

I did four guest lectures for Liberty.me back in July/August. Here’s the first one; I don’t know if they eventually will all be made public. They asked me to go through my book The Politically Incorrect Guide to Capitalism, which I was happy to do because I haven’t publicly lectured on a lot of these […]

Canadian Budget Cuts Didn’t Rely on “Offsetting Monetary Expansion”

I manage to take on both Keynesians and Market Monetarists in this blog post, while sparing David R. Henderson. It’s like in the arcade when you shoot the bad guys without hitting the civilians. (David R. Henderson might even call himself a Market Monetarist; I’m not sure. Don’t ruin my joke.) The conclusion: The experience […]

Emanuel Derman FTW

Tyler Cowen linked to this symposium in the Guardian on Piketty’s success. Emanuel Derman’s response is awesome; here’s the latter half: [Economists] can’t agree on the efficacy of money printing or austerity. They keep changing their minds every few years about conventional wisdom while at every instant appearing to be certain that they are right. […]