Conservative economists are sometimes stereotyped as being anti-inflation, ‘hard-money‘ Austrians because the Austrians tend to be staunchly conservative. This is not fair because the Austrian gold-bugs are a very small faction of conservatism compared with the Keynesian conservatives who have…
Blog Archives
Primer On Macroeconomics Political Divisions
Updated 2018/01/26 Unlike the natural sciences, macroeconomic ideas have implications that can dramatically redistribute wealth. That makes macroeconomics much more political than the natural sciences (with the exception of climate change) and the left–right political spectrum between progressives and conservatives…
Posted in Macro
Australian Economic Miracle?
Matt Yglesias at Slate’s Moneybox has been focusing on Australia’s two-decades without a recession because: The fact that a living breathing developed economy seems to have mastered the trick of avoiding spells of mass unemployment should be a bigger story…
Posted in Macro
Why are US Health Care Costs So High?
The US healthcare system is notable for its extremely high costs compared with all other countries, and poor results compared with other rich countries. But the US also has the most unequal healthcare system and our poor outcome statistics are…
Posted in Health
“Statistics make smart people smarter, and dumb people dumber.”
Mark Twain famously said, “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.” I would counter that it is much harder to lie using statistics than without statistics because statistics are so precise and easier to verify than…
Posted in MELI & Econ Stats, Philosophy and ethics
Libertarians Often Care About Millionaires More Than The Median
Today Tyler Cowen writes that “Singapore is inequality on steroids” and he notes how inequality is causing increasing segregation and rising indebtedness due to exorbitant car and housing prices, but he is a big fan of the Singapore model. He…
Is High CEO Pay Good For The Median?
Alex Tabarrock is a libertarian whose political ideology tends to support higher income for the elites. For example, he writes: Steven Ballmer announced today that he would retire. Microsoft stock shot up immediately …an increase in value of about $18…
Posted in Medianism
Medianism 