I got an email yesterday from Nobel Laureate, Vernon Smith, on behalf of an organization called EconomistLetter.com. They want me to join 150 other economists in signing a letter to stop the proposed minimum wage hike. EconomistLetter.com points out that…
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Don’t Let The BETTER Be The Enemy Of The GOOD, Especially If You Don’t Know Anything Better
Posted in Medianism, Public Finance
When is equity efficient? Usually.
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…
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…
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
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…
It Is OK That Raising The Minimum Wage Hurts Someone
Economists like to talk a lot about Pareto improvements. This is the idea that you can make a change that improves life for somebody and hurts nobody. A Pareto improvement is obviously always an good idea. Nobody could object by…
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