Economics, technology, and how we think.
The first is a famous one, from Milton Friedman, via Justin Fox’s The Myth of the Rational Market: [T]he relevant question to ask about the “assumptions of a theory is not whether they are descriptively “realistic,” for they never are, but whether they are sufficiently good approximations for the purpose at hand. And this question …
Continue reading “3 very different views of economic models”
At the very end of 2012, I wrote a piece for MIT Technology Review (paywall) about an interesting schism in Democratic economic policy circles. Gene Sperling had replaced Larry Summers as director of the National Economic Council in early 2011, and over the next couple of years the Obama administration seemed to talk more about industrial …
The assumption that economic growth and equality are necessarily at odds is fading fast. That’s via Greg Ip and The Wall Street Journal. If inequality were the price we paid for growth, you’d expect productivity and income captured by the rich to go hand-in-hand. Instead, we see virtually the opposite. Sure enough, the conversation here is …
The questions of whether we can trust economists and what economics is good for are back, thanks to a New York Times post last week making an outrageous claim: The fact that the discipline of economics hasn’t helped us improve our predictive abilities suggests it is still far from being a science At Bloomberg, economist …
Via Reihan Salam, here’s a bit from Greg Mankiw: one reason that people differ in their incomes is that some people care more about having a high income than others… Bryan [Caplan] goes on to suggest that to the extent this is true, it weakens the case for income redistribution. He is absolutely right. Most …
Continue reading “Workaholics and redistribution: Some people like working more than others”
This is a bit outside the normal scope of the blog, but I’ve been shocked to see the point not be made elsewhere. You may have seen the excellent NYT article from a couple weeks back “How the U.S. Lost Out on iPhone Work.” It’s a terrific piece of journalism but with one major error. …
Continue reading “American manufacturing, “flexibility”, and labor costs”
http://static.bloggingheads.tv/ramon/_live/players/player_v5.2-licensed.swf I try to avoid politics here on the blog, even though it’s something I read about and talk about quite a bit. But there’s a point about inequality that I’ve been startled to see conservatives either missing or ignoring. In the clip above, Rich Lowry makes what I believe is a very misguided statement, …
I have a review of Yochai Benkler’s new book up at The Atlantic today. Here’s the gist: Benkler had described and classified the possible motivations driving Wikipedians in his 2006 tome The Wealth of Networks, in which he analyzed the Internet’s impact on the economics of information. In his new book, The Penguin and the Leviathan, Benkler …
beyond the times 