EconoSpeak

 Tyler Cowen links to a an NBER working paper with an excerpt from the paper: “Under only the efficiency channel, the optimal minimum wage is narrowly around $8, robust to social welfare weights, and generates small welfare gains that recover only 2 percent of the efficiency losses from monopsony power.” A measly $8 ?  So much for the "efficiency" channel. What are the other channels? Here is the abstract:It has long been argued that a minimum wage could alleviate efficiency losses from...

This is what new Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin said when he made an executive order on the first day of his term to ban school systems from having mask mandates. Some systems will not go along, including that in Arlington and mine in the city of Harrisonburg. He claims to be defending the rights of parents, somehow not noting that he is violating the rights of parents who do not want their children be forced to be in school with unmasked children, thus raising their chances of getting...

On January 13, the US Supreme Court, by a vote of 6-3, blocked the Biden administration’s vaccine mandate.  The policy took the form of an emergency OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Administration) standard and would have required all firms with more than 100 workers to mandate vaccination or a testing regime as a condition for remaining employed.  The conservative majority on the court argued that this measure was too far from the original intent of the law to warrant the deference that...

 Maybe. We have gotten so used to the idea that to the extent it is even meaningful it is flat at inflation rate of 2%, nobody talks about the old textbook Phillips Curve that slopes down.  But there is some evidence that out of all these pandemic upheavals it may be back, at least for awhile. If this is the case then indeed there may be a tradeoff, and the higher inflation the US is experiencing may be due partly to strong fiscal and monetary stimulus, with that also bringing about higher...

 Adorno's metaphor of the "matadors of the culture industry" didn't fall out of the sky. Nearly four decades earlier -- sometime between 1931 and 1933 -- he had written several short pieces, one of which was titled "Applause." I came across mention of it when I was looking to see if Susan Buck-Morss had anything to say about pseudo-activity in her The Origin of Negative Dialectics. I didn't find anything on pseudo-activity there but her quote from "Applause" seemed to tie right in to the...

When Theodor Adorno referred to "one of those matadors of the culture industry," in his "Free Time" radio lecture, he was presumably referring to the idols of stage, screen, television, or recording studio who are the staples of the supermarket tabloid personality cult.Oddly, though, his construction of the paragraph leaves open the interpretation that Adorno himself is "one of those  matadors" and the "culture industry" is the bull he is fighting. After all, he and Horkheimer coined "the...

 It remains too soon to comment in detail on the current upheaval in Kazakhstan as it is simply impossible to figure out what is happening, with multiple conflicting accounts and claims coming from many sources. Rather I want to comment on a deeper question that has been brought up in connection with this, although not central to it, but one that affects Kazakhstan's Central Asian neighbors as well: what alphabet should they use? This is something that is an ongoing issue in several of these...

In a radio lecture he gave two and a half months before he died in 1969, Theodor Adorno explored the paradox that people do not know what to do with their free time and thus no longer even like it because "[t]hat state of freedom has been refused them and disparaged for so long." People are generally more familiar with the Kris Kristofferson / Fred Foster version of the same idea from their song "Me and Bobby MeGee":Freedom's just another word for nothing left to loseNothin' ain't worth...

 Incoming GOP Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin has just announced his choice for Secretary of Natural Resourxes, Andrew Wheeler, a longtime coal lobbyist, who seved as Trump's EPA director in the latter part of his term. He has an utterly abysmal environmental record, so bad I cannot think of a single thing he did that I can applaud or even ust vaguely approve ot. It was just simply all bad.He combined blocking new rules such as limiting mercury emissions into water and many others, with...

 For those of you of a branch of Orthodox Christianity still using the Julian calendar, such as the Russian branch, Merry Christmas! I am tempted to comment on the situation in Kazakhstan, but I think we do not know what is going on there yet, so not now.Instead somehow I have been thinking about something that has something to do with economics, but I am going to look at it in other fields, namely the relationship between classicalism and revolution.  That this is complicated in that in...