Economics

Archive for Economics

An Argument About Corporate Consistency

Inspired by this Sumner post, I recently tweeted: Someone chimed in to say I was an idiot, and that he could obviously reconcile those two propositions. So I came back and said (paraphrasing), “OK, so if the government keeps cycling back and forth, first raising the corporate tax rate 5 percentages points then cutting it […]

Is the Male Labor Force Half Working or Half Unemployed?

(That’s an optimist vs. pessimist joke.) In the comments of this previous post, several of you were encouraging me to set aside issues about an aging population and women entering the work force, by looking at prime-age working males. OK I’m happy to do that: So, we can say that 7 years after bottoming out, […]

Steve Landsburg Wants You to Go Forth and Multiply

He gave the Hayek Lecture this year at IEA: This guy’s got a one-track mind, amirite?

Reductio Ad Absurdum on Keynes?

I got this email (with permission to reprint). I would have to think about it some more before offering my own reaction, but I’m curious to hear your thoughts first. Message: I may have invented this reductio ad absurdum regarding Keynesianism. It starts predictably, but goes further than the usual construction. Keynes says that taking […]

How to Beam Factories to Mars

I give some practical instruction in this piece. An excerpt: Now suppose that the Martians finally get their wifi routers working, and they are shocked to discover intelligent life on the nearby blue planet. After figuring out how to communicate and consummate financial transactions, an amazing thing happens: Massive amounts of financial capital from human […]

This Is What It Looks Like When Scientists Don’t Understand Something

Tyler Cowen linked to this Nature article, which I find unintentionally hilarious. The first sentence alone is magnificent: “Physicists are growing ever more frustrated in their hunt for dark matter — the massive but hard-to-detect substance that is thought to comprise 85% of the material Universe.” I beseech you, please do not lecture me in […]

A Machine Puzzle (3 of 3)

Earlier I asked how it could be possible that one cryptocurrency appreciated at 10% a year while another appreciated at 20%, and several people in the comments correctly said that the dollar-price of a coin could adjust accordingly. So the rate of return *measured in dollars* for the two different cryptocoins could be equal, even […]

A Sovereign Bond Puzzle (2 of 3)

Don’t worry kids, I’ll give you the punchline after this one. But I can see in the comments here that you people still aren’t getting what this has to do with Krugman on Kapital. So, not a trick question: The 5-year Treasury yield right now is about 2%. The 5-year Japanese government bond yield is […]