EconoSpeak

What’s economics?  There are two answers.  One is it’s the sphere of human activity encompassing the production and distribution of goods and services, which has sometimes been referred to as provisioning.  This is quite a lot but not everything.  It includes meditation classes but not meditation, making and selling binoculars but not bird-watching, etc.  The problem is that it includes so much of human life that it is barely a delineation at all.  From this perspective farming is part of...

A lot of the criticisms of putting the twin village idiots known as Herman Cain and Stephen Moore on the FED assert that they are gold bugs. Kate Riga watched CNN when Erin Burnett interviewed Stephen Moore on this allegation: Stephen Moore tries to flip-flop on the gold standard — but Erin Burnett is prepared and armed with a montage of his past statements Watch and enjoy! Now Moore did say he would prefer targeting an index of commodity prices, which led me to FRED and its Global Price...

John Harwood reports: Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren proposes raising $1 trillion in government revenue from a new tax on profits of the largest corporations. The proposed surtax would prevent Amazon and other companies with profits exceeding $100 million from wiping out their tax liabilities altogether. Instead of taxable corporate income as defined by the IRS, the 7% surtax would apply to profits companies report to their investors. A lot to like. Look – I hated that...

The propagandist will not accuse the enemy of just any misdeed, he will accuse him of the very intention that he himself has and of trying to commit the very crime that he himself is about to commit. -- Jacques Ellul, Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes And you know something is happening, but you don't know what it is. Do you, Mister Jones? -- Bob Dylan, Ballad of a Thin Man Candace Owens testified today at the House Judiciary Committee hearing on hate crime. Shorter Owens: the...

I was struck by this morning’s headline in the New York Times: No doubt this was intended as irony, but that itself is ironic, since the “unrealistic” attitude it sums up is actually a good starting point for policy.  France has one of the world’s better welfare states, and it should be preserved and enhanced.  French taxes are very high—almost half of national income—and should be cut.  Carbon needs to be priced far more comprehensively and aggressively than Macron’s idiotic gas...

John Cochrane thinks we liberals who think higher minimum wages can do some good by offsetting monopsony power fail to grasp labor economics. He is citing some work by Jeffrey Clemens, Lisa B. Kahn, and Jonathan Meer. Alas his blog post screwed up the link to this interesting paper: Compensation consists of a combination of cash and non-cash attributes, and depends on worker productivity. We also allow for the possibility of a bargaining wedge whereby the firm pays less in total...

Starting around 2011 or so, Donald Trump began to get a lot of attention on the looney racist right in the US by becoming one of the leading advocates of birtherism, the claim that Barack Obama was born in Kenya rather than Hawaii.  Of course, Obamam's father was born in Kenya.Now, curiously, Trump is at it again, although now involving his own family.  He has taken to claiming that his father was born in Germany.  His father's father was born there apparently, with the name "Drumpf."  But...

William S. Lind's cultural Marxism conspiracy theory boils down to the claim that in his essay, "Repressive Tolerance," Herbert Marcuse "called for tolerance for all ideas and viewpoints coming from the left and intolerance of all ideas and viewpoints coming from the right" and that college administrators and professors have put Marcuse's proposal into practice in the form of "Political Correctness."Marcuse did indeed make a statement that seemed to propose exactly that: "Liberating...

...it would be absurd to subscribe to the author the unintended consequences of an author's statements without considering the circumstances which surround them. It is, however, equally absurd to pretend that the ideological history of a work's consequences are entirely extrinsic. -- Jürgen Habermas With all its limitations and distortions, democratic tolerance is under all circumstances more humane than an institutionalized intolerance which sacrifices the rights and liberties of the...

On March 15 a gunman opened fire on worshipers in two Christchurch mosques, killing 50 and wounding around the same number. Survivors of gunshot wounds often have traumatic injuries that require multiple surgeries and leave them severely disabled for life. Before embarking on his rampage, the alleged gunman broadcast over the internet a "manifesto" outlining the motive for his deed.In his manifesto, the alleged perpetrator claimed to have had "brief contact" with "Knight Justiciar" Anders...