Yi Wen, the Assistant Vice President of the St. Louis Fed and his Research Associate, Maria A. Arias wrote an article which blamed the great recession of 2008 on, “the private sector’s dramatic increase in their willingness to hoard money instead of spend…
Yearly Archives: 2015
Money, Brahmagupta, and the big bang.
Considering how important and obvious zero is to educated people today, zero is a surprisingly difficult concept. Most children under the age of five cannot grasp it at all and it was unknown for most of human history. The Romans…
Posted in Macro
There’s gold in them thar standards!
Note: This post is 3460 words–about a fourteen minute read. Several presidential candidates have been in favor of the gold standard including Ron Paul in 2012 and Rand Paul and Ted Cruz in 2015. In response, Megan McArdle, explained why…
Posted in Macro
Entrepreneurialism is overrated.
What inputs are required for the production of goods and services? All modern economics textbooks agree that labor and capital are fundamental factors of production. Some textbooks also include land which is usually a shorthand for all natural resources including…
Posted in Development, Managerial Micro
How Americans sabotage welfare programs
Joseph Stromberg wrote an explainer about why the US has worse public transit than any other rich nation in the world despite providing greater subsidies per rider. It isn’t just because the US is more spread-out or more enthusiastic about…
Posted in Discrimination
Are the Democrats poised to crush Republicans or will Republicans continue crushing Democrats?
Kevin Drum argues that demographic trends and political priorities are both conspiring to doom the Republican party to electoral defeat and that this helps explain the disarray of the Republican presidential campaigns so far. To the contrary, Matt Yglesias argues that…
Posted in Public Finance
Textbook examples of ‘moral hazard’ are not morally hazardous
I opened a copy of James Henderson’s 2012 Health Economics & Policy textbook today and saw a criticism of 3rd-party insurance payment illustrated by this example on page 7: Spending Somebody Else’s Money A Wall Street Journal article [by James P.…
Posted in Health
Medianism 