EconoSpeak

It took awhile for me to remember after his apparent suicide that the late Alan Krueger was the coauthor of what I consider to be the best paper published on happiness economics, "Develpments in the Measurement of Subjective Well-Being," Journal of Economic Perspectives, 2006, 20(1), 2-24, https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/08953300677 .  (I apologize if that link is no good.)This paper was coauthored with is Princeton colleague, Nobel-Prize winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman. ...

The fundamentals are "sound"?:PICTURE = 1000 WORDS

It was back at the beginning of the 1990s, and I was putting together a panel on NAFTA for the ASSA meetings.  This would be URPE’s big plenary at the event, and, among others, I was able to enlist Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, a leader of uncommon integrity and seriousness of purpose whose victory in the 1988 Mexican presidential election was overturned through blatant fraud.  I wanted someone of stature to present the case in favor of NAFTA, however, and I thought of Krueger because of his...

This analysis of Boeing’s catastrophic design failure on the 737 Max confirms speculation from other sources; interestingly, it was prepared even before last week’s crash in Ethiopia.  Engineers can pick apart the technical aspects, beginning with the underlying tradeoff between energy efficiency and stability (why nose elevation and drop was such a problem to begin with), but I’m interested in the political economy dimension.Under the Obama administration, the FAA chose to delegate critical...

My eyes were drawn to Timothy Taylor’s gloss on Greg Mankiw’s ruminations on the life of an econ textbook author.  As such an animal myself (Microeconomics and Macroeconomics: A Fresh Start), I’ve thought about many of the same questions.  Differently.Issue #1: How do you teach the introductory economics courses if you have a dissenting perspective?  Mankiw lays out three alternatives, teaching the mainstream and suppressing your own views, teaching minority or fringe views (i.e. your own),...

On the forthcoming March 24.This last of the Beat Poets, who founded and still owns both the City Lights bookstore and the associated City Lights press, which legally overcame an effort in 1956 to prevent him from publishing Allen Ginsberg's poem, _Howl_, he is not only alive and well by current reports, and looking forward to his centennial birthday party, but his bookstore on Columbus Avenue in San Francisco as well as his press are also doing well.  Apparently the celebrations will begin...

Peter writes: "I was provoked into thinking about this by a dreadful book review in The Nation: David Bell on Sophia Rosenfeld’s Democracy and Truth.  I haven’t read Rosenfeld, and maybe she’s pretty good, but it’s clear Bell is confused about the very starting point for thinking about the problem.  He talks about “regimes of truth”, which he cribs from Foucault: there is no capital-T truth out there, just different views on it which possess more or less power/authority.  We happen to...

Late last week, Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) announced that he will not run for president in 2020, declaring that he would prefer to stay in the Senate to criticize President Trump and support whomever the Dems nominate against Trump.  He had been hiighly priased by various commentators, including Chris Matthews, and even conservative columnist, George Will, who wrote an entire column in WaPo praising him.  In repeated polling among Daily Kos activists he was running around fifth or sixth at...

Probbly not, but there has been some movement in that direction.  The New Economic Policy  (NEP) was the Socviet system in the 1920s after the WarCommunism period and before Stalin imposed command central planning as well ass full state ownership of the means of production, classsic socialism.  The War Communism period was a command economy, but without central planning.  Famine appeared as authorities demande crops from farmers.The NEP was a partial move back from War Communism to a mixed...

The apparently falling standards for what people are willing to believe in seems to be the topic of the day.  We have immense, well-capitalized media outlets like Fox News just making stuff up, crazy conspiracies on the internet, a refusal to accept scientific expertise on matters, like climate change, where it is as well established as it’s ever been.  What’s up with all this?I was provoked into thinking about this by a dreadful book review in The Nation: David Bell on Sophia Rosenfeld’s...