So Mitch McConnell and the senate Republicans want blanket employer liability protection as the price of another round of economic support. They have this leverage because Democrats kept postponing their agenda until they were the only ones with a list of things they wanted to spend money on.(This illustrates classic bargaining theory to a T. Bargaining power depends on how much you think you will lose if the agreement is delayed [Rubinstein] or fails completely. Democrats feared economic...
Read More »Conspiracy Theories: How to Pick Out the Plausible Ones
This is an age of rampant conspiratorialism. Bill Gates is behind the pandemic because he wants to shoot you full of vaccines. No wait, it’s all those 5G cell towers. Or maybe it’s bioterrorism from China. Or just a hoax perpetrated by international capital to undermine Donald Trump, the people’s tribune. The right wing disinformation machine cranks out this stuff constantly, but paranoid fantasies also emanate from the left/alternative world.So to counter the conspiracy pandemic,...
Read More »“Dr. Doom” At It Again: Predicts 10-Year Depression
That would be Nouriel Roubini of NYU who got his moniker back during the Great Recession, which he called pretty well in 2006. He did this clearly yesterday in an interview in The Intelligencer, although he has been pushing something like this for some time now, bringing in all sorts of things like climate change and more pandemics to reinforce this long run forecasr, although he thinks in a decade there may be a sufficient restrucuting of the economy to improve the situation. While he...
Read More »For The Record About These Ads
Yet again I am upset that we are getting ads for Trump here. I have made an inquiry to a knowledgeable person, and I have not been given a clear explanation for why all these ads are appearing here, with there seeeming to be more and more of them all the time. I do wish to say that I do not believe any of us are getting any money for any of this; I certainly am not. And I wish they would go away. But I do not know how to do it, and nobody else around here that I have communicated with...
Read More »Woke Is Reactionary: The Small Business Lending Edition
We live in a drastically unequal society. Everywhere you look you will find injustice, constraint and exploitation. Being a member of a racial or other minority increases the odds you will end up on the short end, so what should we do about it? There’s a progressive solution, to change the system so injustice, constraint and exploitation are minimized. And then there’s the woke solution, to demand benefits targeted to minorities (and women) that will more evenly distribute the injustice,...
Read More »RIP Oliver Williamson
Oliver Williamson died yesterday at age 87, I do not know of what. He was famous as the main developer of New Institutional Economics, following the influence of Ronald Coase, which emphasizes the role of transactions costs in the formation and development of economic (and some other) institutions. He received the Nobel Prize in 2009, along with Elinor Ostrom, but his influence was really quite vast for a man from a working class background, born in Superior, Wisconsin.I checked, and...
Read More »How Large is the Income Shifting Problem?
I took up this invitation from Dan Shaviro: tomorrow morning I'll be participating in a very interesting international tax policy conference with a number of outstanding participants. It's on Zoom … I'm actually the second speaker on Panel II (although we're listed above alphabetically), so I will be speaking from roughly 11:08 to 11:15. I'm planning to discuss the OECD's Pillar 1 and Pillar 2 initiatives, although what exactly I'll say remains somewhat flexible pending the keynote...
Read More »Maybe This Is Not (Technically) A Recession?
Here I am using what is the journalistic definition of a "recession," also used in many nations although not officially in the US, where these things are determined ex post by an NBER committee. Anyway, that "journalistic" definition is that there be two consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth. Today in the Washington Post I saw a story on global carbon emissions, which are very closedly correlated with GDP, if not perfectly. Anyway, it appears that global carbon emissions hit bottom...
Read More »“Obamagate!”
I know, I should probably not waste everybody's time commenting on this nonsense, but the push on it has been masssive, with it seeming to influence a lot of people it should not, so I have decided some pushback is called for, even if those who should see it do not. I am partly triggered in this by getting defriended on Facebook yesterday by a generally intelligent libertarian academic economist I know who started massively linking to every crackpot pushing this nonsense, and when I...
Read More »Four Days On, Ten Days Off
A very interesting paper (not peer-reviewed) by a team of Israeli scholars proposes that a more manageable exit from pandemic lockdown might be achieved by implementing a scheme in which employees go in to work for four days and then return to isolation for ten days before repeating the cycle. A variation on the proposal would have two staggered relays of workers cycling through the 14 day routine.The research has been popularized in a New York Times op-ed and a Fast Company feature, so I...
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