Updated January 15, 2024 Economics textbooks have been overly obsessed with the idea that greater equity (fairness) usually leads to less efficiency (production of goods and services). Economists typically measure equity as equality of monetary wealth because the typical economist…
Yearly Archives: 2014
It is an equity-efficiency CURVE, not a tradeoff
Economists are obsessed with efficiency which means* the maximum production of goods and services as measured at market prices. Maximizing GDP is the most common form of efficiency worship. The most popular economics textbook, by Greg Mankiw begins by laying…
Stop Pretending Anybody Wants Exactly Equal Wealth
Millions of people have seen a great 6-minute video that explains research about inequality by Michael Norton of Harvard Business School and Dan Ariely of Duke [pdf]. Unfortunately, the video propagates a common misleading trope by claiming that a perfectly…
Posted in Inequality, Public Finance
New York City is rather poor!
Note: This is updated post from my pathetically small Medianist website as an experiment (mentioned earlier) to see if I get more traffic on this hosting service or on my previous hosting service. Yglesias notes that New York City is…
Posted in Medianism
Pareto efficiency and the wingnut theorem
Many academics like the concept of Pareto optimality because it is the easiest moral criteria to agree that it is a good thing and that we should avoid any situation that isn’t Pareto optimal. Pareto optimality is similar to the…
Posted in Medianism
WordPress vs. Blogger
Since blog traffic depends on whether an audience can find them, bloggers put a lot of work into search-engine optimization (SEO). SEO is a set of strategies to get noticed in search-engine results. There are numerous businesses where you can…
Revealed Preference: The Fed Favors Money Hoarders Over The Unemployed
Ryan Avent at The Economist produced some original research about what the Fed thinks: HAVING combed through the Fed transcripts the old-fashioned way, we decided to apply some fancier techniques. We plugged all 1,865 pages of central-bankery into a computer programme…
Medianism 