Many economists have blamed Alan Greenspan for creating the housing bubble by keeping interest rates too low. This is wrongheaded. As Blinder’s excellent new book explains, low interest rates only contributed slightly to the housing bubble which was mainly caused…
Blog Archives
The Fed’s Primary Aim Is Helping The Banks
John Cassidy has an excellent article about the banking industry, but I quibble with his ending: Helping the banks isn’t the Fed’s primary aim, of course. Ben Bernanke’s monetary policy was designed to stimulate the over-all economy… But one of its…
Do Monetarists Understand Their Own Models?
I have learned a lot from Nick Rowe. For example, he wrote a great post where he pointed out a place where many Keynesians don’t understand their own models. But the following section suggests that Nick doesn’t completely understand his…
The Streetlight Fallacy
The Streetlight Fallacy is a kind of informal fallacy in which people over-emphasize readily-available information even though it is clearly wrong instead of looking for the right information. It is a version of the availability heuristic, except that in the…
Posted in Medianism, Philosophy and ethics
News Flash: Americans Are Mostly Below AVERAGE Income…
…And Tyler Cowen Predicts That Even Fewer Will Be Above AVERAGE In The Future Garrison Keillor jokes that in the mythological town of Lake Woebegone, all the students are above average. This is humorous because it is mathematically impossible for…
Posted in Medianism
“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…
Medianism 