EconoSpeak

Last weekend I attended a conference at NYU Law School on "Behavioral Economics and the New Paternalism, organized by Austrian economist Mario Rizzo and classical liberal law professor Richard Epstein. It included economists, lawyers, philosophers, and a couple of psychologists.  While there was a range of views present a theme for many and especially of the organizers was bashing the ideas about "libertarian paternalist" nudging advocated by Richard Thaler, winner of the most recent...

With the news that Rudolph Giuliani has joined "Mobster Don" Trump's legal defense team, it seems that it would be timely to again raise the historical specter of the odd series of events that led to James Comey's letter to Congress about the emails on Anthony Weiner's laptop. Originally posted November 7, 2016, reposted May 9,2017Who is James K. Kallstrom? Kallstrom is the retired FBI assistant director and frequent Fox News guest who has been orchestrating the "revolt" of FBI agents from...

Today’s New York Times has a fine article by Manil Suri about math education and the development of reasoning skills.  Its concluding point is that, while the general contribution of the first to the second is weaker than you might think, math instruction can be improved by bringing the math-reasoning tests themselves into the classroom.  I’m pretty confident that Suri is right, since I’ve seen positive results from doing something similar in economics and related areas.When preparing to...

The REAL Trump pee-tape was a urine sampling pyramid scheme."Whatever happened to Trump neckties?" asks  Zane Anthony, Kathryn Sanders and David A. Fahrenthold at the Washington Post, "They’re over. So is most of Trump’s merchandising empire." Among the products that Trump lent his name to, for a fee, was a vitamin supplement, supposedly custom formulated based on the results of a urine test: "Take a snapshot of the most critical metabolic markers in your body’s natural waste fluids," said...

That would be Richard A. Easterlin, age 92, retiring this spring from the U. of Southern California after being there since 1981, following an earlier stint at U. of Penn, where he got his PhD under Simon Kuznets.  Kuznets in turn got his from Wesley Clair Mitchell, who was in turn the student of Thorstein Veblen, and it was mentioned (by me actually) at this conference that happened over this past weekend at USC that Easterlin's work has emphasized the issue of social comparisons that was...

This post follows the previous one and explains why I get so exercised about the politics of equity at a place like Evergreen State College.  The single issue at the heart of activism at Evergreen for the past two years is mandatory diversity training for faculty.  This was first proposed by the Equity Council (which was set up by the college administration and whose name changed a bit from year to year) and brought before the faculty, where it failed on a secret ballot.  Equity people were...

Who knew when I posted this: We could go back to 2002 and how the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution of 2002 was sold to people like Senator John Kerry and Senator Hillary Clinton. The Bush-Cheney White House sold this as a means to encourage Iraq to comply with certain UN resolutions and not necessarily a prelude to war. Of course the White House was lying as we knew by March 2003. Of course Bush-Cheney lied about a lot of things with respect to Iraq back then...

President Trump sent two of his minions out yesterday to lie about this question. Kudlow: We are not in a trade war. What this is is an attempt to right some of the wrongs with respect to China. Our Treasury Secretary said essentially the same thing: Our objective is still not to be in a trade war with [China] … I'm cautiously optimistic that we will be able to work this out.". We could go back to 2002 and how the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution of 2002...

The “Independent” External Review Panel on The Evergreen State College Response to the Spring 2017 Campus Events (quotes not in the original) just released its report, and it says that everything campus administration has done in connection with this episode and everything it is now doing in response to it is beyond reproach.  It repeats the arguments of the college’s “equity” faction (again my quotes—it has little to do with equity) in the faction’s own language and omits any information...

Paul Krugman relates declines in stock valuations to the insanity of trade policy from Donald Trump and taught me a new expression - stranded asset: An asset that is worth less on the market than it is on a balance sheet due to the fact that it has become obsolete in advance of complete depreciation. Paul notes: Yet there is a reason why stock prices might overshoot the overall economic costs of a trade war. For a trade war that “deglobalized” the U.S. economy would require a big...