Economist's View

It still exists (although reduced) but the trouble is breaking in. For economics my favorite is http://economistsview.typepad.com/ which has a huge blogroll, and those blogs, say http://crookedtimber.org/ have their own blogrolls and so on. What are some of your guys' favorites?

Economics? Get a good, mainstream textbook (read the alternative stuff after you have a good grasp of the regular material, if you want). Here's one that's free: http://www.introecon.com/ Also, following blogs is a good way to learn. I like this one: http://economistsview.typepad.com/ and this one: http://www.marginalrevolution.com/ Start with those, and they'll link to others.

> Why are there so many successful startups in Stockholm? 1) work ethics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_Sweden 2) 33 sunshine hours in December: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm#Climate > Why is US GDP growth so weirdly constant? http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2011/05/does-this-eas… Holy cow. Great depression. Hitler coming to power, WW2... Clearly observable.

I don't think there is anything to the theory. The Laffer Curve works great in theory, in practice it never does. http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2012/06/laughing-at-t… "Not aware of any evidence in recent history where tax cuts actually raise revenue. Sorry, Laffer."

I feel you. For those who don't, here are a few relevant readings: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-great-american-bubble-ma… http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2009/10/how-paulson-g… That said, it's not Goldman's fault as much as it is the US gov's fault... It's failure to regulate that financial industry is humongous.

The FT data objections are far from the strongest objections to Pinketty's work. Here are a few criticisms seem much more serious than nitpicking the data: http://www.econ.nyu.edu/user/debraj/Papers/Piketty.pdf http://aida.wss.yale.edu/smith/piketty1.pdf http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2014/05/unpacking-the… In brief, his theoretical mechanisms that supposedly predict and explain greater wealth accumulation are actually unsound, and if anything this seems to be the evolving consensus among economists who study the area.

Two more sites: I use http://economistsview.typepad.com/ to get a summary of opinions and links to other sources, and I understand there are now some finance videos/courses at http://khanacadmey.org under the Banking/Money section (I haven't vetted them yet).

Bookwise, some places to start for general overviews of economics are: "New Ideas from Dead Economists" by Todd Buchholtz "Naked Economics" by Charles Wheelan Blogwise: http://www.marginalrevolution.com/ is entertaining and filled with good insights from a libertarian point of view. http://economistsview.typepad.com/ has more centrist/liberal views on a variety of economic issues and has a good set of links to daily economic-related blog posts from various points of view. The above blogs have enough links to other blogs to get you started, and they will give you different points of view on current topics.

It always amazes me to see how, no matter what the crisis is, conservatives will find some way to blame the poor. Ah, let's see: just five minutes of research turns up this: http://www.ourfuture.org/blog-entry/mythbusting-rights-subprime-excuse… and http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2008/04/did-liberals-… and http://www.prospect.org/csnc/blogs/ezraklein_archive?month=04&year… . Unlike Arrington's ridiculously stupid and uninformed ranting these articles have real numbers that show that at best just 20% of the all those "bad loans" out there originated outside of CRA-regulated banks. At this point most economists have conceded that the CRA had little, if any, contribution to the current crisis but this won't stop conservatives and their faithful wingnuts from lying and trying to blame everything on a 30 year old law.

This is one of the big controversies in happiness economics. I wonder if this effect (which directly contradicts Easterlin's findings that money has no effect on happiness past a certain point; here, they contend that there is no saturation point and that happiness evolves with the logarithm of income) could be somewhat due to the way they framed the question: "assume you are on a ladder of happiness with 10 steps, which one would you say you are on; then tell us how much you earn". It is widely known in behavioral economics that framing effects can have a huge effect on the way people respond ([1] [2], and so on), so I wouldn't be surprised than the way you ask people to evaluate their own happiness could explain at least part of the difference. One of the conclusions of the Easterlin Paradox is that people care more about how much they earn compared to their neighbors than the actual amount. I feel like asking the question this way (imagining their happiness as a ladder with 10 steps, then thinking about their income) would directly lead to people implicitly internalizing this comparison in some kind of mental model where higher wealth = more happiness because they're trying to imagine what the best life possible could be: "ah I'm pretty happy right now, but if I had a twice as much money I think I would be happier though, so surely I can't be at the last step at the ladder. Actually, people who have twice as much than that should be even happier, so I'll add some steps…

I'm talking about measures like these, which granted, are only recorded back 100 years or so: https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/2015/demo/gini-index-of-… https://economistsview.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451b33869e201a5115729b597… https://www.getrevue.co/profile/mark-abdelnour/issues/abd-s-angle-inco…

I'd look for other sources to back your claims-- not just the tax foundation https://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2017/11/11/the-tax-foundation-has-so… https://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2008/08/the-greek-me… https://www.cbpp.org/research/federal-tax/tax-foundation-figures-do-no…

Workers are benefiting from it, at least financially. The median income in the U.S. is more than 20% higher than in Finland, adjusted for cost of living: https://economistsview.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451b33869e20133f44756f797… (Note also that the American work-week is only about 7% longer than the Finish work-week.) That difference increases as you go into the upper middle class. But for the bottom 10%, which in the U.S. largely consists of people who do not work, U.S. incomes are a third lower.

"That increasing tendency to embrace methods and models for their own sake rather than because they can help us answer substantively important questions is, I believe, a misstep for the field. This trend is in part the result of the otherwise normal and productive workings of science, but it is also reinforced by less legitimate motives, particularly organizational self-interest and the particularities of our intellectual culture." Perhaps they are becoming another tribe of the Econ, as described by Dr. Leijonhufvud is his 1973 essay 'Life among the Econ' - https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1465-7295.1973.tb010… edit - here's the full text, unpaywalled - https://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2007/05/axel_leijonh…

More citations: https://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2010/03/red-states-b… https://wallethub.com/edu/states-most-least-dependent-on-the-federal-g…

Step one is defining a target condition. The problem is that people have different target conditions. The enormous rise in inequality since the 1960s [1] makes clear that some people have a target condition of "I personally own everything". [1] http://economistsview.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451b33869e201a5115729b5970…

Milton Friedman wasn't Austrian, as far as I can tell: http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2006/01/milton_friedm… https://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/08/11/friedman-and-the-austrian… Usually people compare with Chicago school macroeconomics (freshwater/saltwater economics), Austrian is not really mainstream.

It's important to remember that "free market" does NOT mean "no regulation". A market inherently requires regulations (i.e. contracts, trademarks, currency policy, etc). Even Adam Smith knew this. [0]http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2010/03/adam-smith-an…

We updated the link from http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2015/08/the-future-of… which points to this.

The Reagan reaction was to drastically increase government spending per capita. The only presidency which increased it more was Nixon/Ford. http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2012/03/per-capita-go…

URL changed from http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2015/04/inet-video-va… which points to this.

I'm not an economist.. I imagine there are papers with better data, but I would have to spend some time trying to find them. I did come by this article which deals with the same question: http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2006/09/measuring-poverty-income-vs-spe… http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2007/06/family-income… If income volatility has increased, it could explain why the spending-income gap is so wide, and why they (poor) spend more on education (retraining to re-enter the workforce). Maybe try asking EconTalk (podcast of economics topics).. Sounds like something he would find interesting, and he often takes questions and makes episodes out of them. http://www.econlib.org/library/contact.html

Deflation is certainly a danger but I found this interesting: http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2013/12/money-and-inf… It should be pointing towards inflation. That's not a prediction on my part, I really don't know.

You are applying a model with fixed r No, this is not true. The whole point is that R=R(r). Its just that the relationship is ~chaotic, not linear. And it gets messy as either r or R --> 0. The fact that preferences are recursive on (r) should not be a surpirse, but I don't think mainstream Economists generally go there. On the topic of "temporary" vs Uncertain changes in (r), they are not the same. One is risk, the other is uncertainty. In general risk is priced a certain way (reasonably efficient), uncertainty is something you have preferences for (ie, you dont "price" it in the normal sense) and can only model indirectly in the first instance.[1] [1] eg, http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2010/06/risk-versus-u…

Labor unions worked exceptionally well in the US: http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2013/05/labor-union-d… Socialism is not the same as Marxism, and has at this point been widely adopted throughout most of the world.

I'm reminded of 18th-century views about animal species extinction (that human-caused extinction could not occur). By the 19th century, that belief had changed. Today, we accept implicitly that human-caused extinction is a fact of life. The rate of extinction for North American freshwater fish species is 877 times the background extinction rate[1]. Of course, there are still people who oppose preservation efforts... Humans are literally an extinction event. Why is it so hard to accept for some that humans are also responsible for climate change? [1] http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2012/08/our-not-so-fi…

This has scared me for quite some time: http://i.imgur.com/ZxBWh.png and: http://i.imgur.com/u6aU2.gif With a plausible explanation: http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2012/04/the-wedge-bet… The only explanation I can come up with is that this happened because it could. Because money is self-reinforcing, and breeds power, which allows control. But I don't think it's sustainable, and I think it's one of the largest, if not the largest problems with our society today. 1. I am not an economist. Is this view in any way valid? Am I seeing the right things? 2. What are the other causes? Surely the economy is complex and there are multiple driving factors. 3. What can we do? Help us all if this can't be resolved. Because that graph is very, very scary and I see this going downhill fast if something doesn't change.

You'd probably appreciate "Life Among The Econ" by Axel Leijonhufvud - http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2007/05/axel_leijonhu…

Non-paywalled link: http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2011/07/paul-krugman-…

It's not actually clear, Mark Thoma just blogged about this w/r/t an NBER paper released earlier this month on this same question: http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2010/08/who-creates-j… Conclusion seems to be that job creation happens most heavily in young firms which manage to survive a few years, but that the high rates of job destruction pretty much wash out small businesses gains otherwise. Would be interesting to hear how VC plays into the equation.