Economics

Archive for Economics

Potpourri

==> An excerpt from Guido Hulsmann’s introduction to (what we know as) The Theory of Money & Credit. Incidentally, I wrote a Study Guide for this book, and believe me, it’s not as intimidating as it first appears. If you have always wanted to be the type of person to read it, but thought you […]

Responding to a Particular Argument on the Minimum Wage

Before my trip, someone on Facebook asked me to respond to his perspective on the minimum wage. He thought the free-marketeers, by rushing to their textbooks, were overlooking something important. I’ll try to distill his position down into a single paragraph (in my words), then respond: CRITIC OF STANDARD FREE-MARKET DISCOURSE ON MINIMUM WAGE: I’m […]

More on Minimum Wage

Daniel Kuehn reproduced the following chart from an EPI paper: Daniel had this commentary: It’s an interesting approach. One does wonder why we should expect the minimum wage to be so damaging given that it grows so much slower than productivity (again – local markets matter – it may grow at a slower rate but […]

While We Were Sleeping…

…someone emailed me to say that the KrugmanDebate pledge total is over $104,000! It may have been due to the heroic efforts of Tom Woods when he was guest-hosting Peter Schiff’s show. (I always picture Tom watching me and thinking, “Bob reminds me a lot of myself, when I was less famous.”) So you make […]

Great Posts on the Minimum Wage

It’s reassuring to see that if I ever decided to retire to the Caribbean permanently, my US-based free-market colleagues would carry forward the torch of liberty. Here are some great posts on the minimum wage: ==> Steve Landsburg ==> Bryan Caplan ==> Scott Sumner (though it’s on ObamaCare technically, but could be applied to minimum […]

New NERA Study on Two Carbon Tax Scenarios

NERA Economic Consulting is out with a very nice study on two carbon tax scenarios. I know this modeling team (well, at least the lead author) and I think they are very nuanced in their analysis; if you scroll through the paper you can see they explain exactly what their charts are saying, etc. This […]

I Am Officially in the Twilight Zone: Callahan and Glasner on Sraffa-Hayek

[UPDATE: I’m slightly editing the “exchange” (which are my words of course) between Hayek and Sraffa to make it closer to their actual words…] It’s a weird situation, I grant you, but I’ve been running around for years saying that the Austrians have never given a good response to Sraffa’s critique of Hayek. (I summarize […]

It’s Monday, So Krugman Thinks Labor Costs Hurt Employment

Commenter “Xan” draws our attention to today’s post from Krugman, in which he writes: A commenter on my last euro post asks a good question: didn’t Germany once have a problem of excessive unit labor costs, which it cured with a protracted squeeze? And in that case, why is it so terrible if Spain is […]