EconoSpeak

Three weeks ago my wife and our daughter and I were in Moscow to celebrate her mother's 90th birthday (which was on March 10).  Somehow when I woke up today it occurred to me that a man born on the same day could have joined the Soviet army and participated in the final push into Berlin for the defeat of Hitler.  Likewise in the US a man born on the day could probably have gotten into the US military and participated in the final actions in Europe or the Pacific of the war. But probably few...

The terrorist mass murder in Christchurch, New Zealand two weeks ago has sent me back to my archives to retrieve my documentation of Anders Breivik's extensive plagiarism of the writings of William S. Lind, et al.Did I say "extensive" plagiarism? Breivik copied and pasted the whole 19,000 word pamphlet, making minor revisions here and there and deleting around 4,000 words that dealt with more arcane academic topics, such as Derridean deconstruction. Below is an example of the markup...

I confess. I posted The Barr Letter and Useful Idiots of the Jaded Left to troll for tin-foil hats. I am agnostic on the Mueller investigation. I have never viewed Mueller, Comey or Rachel Maddow as the savior of truth, justice and the American Way. My objection to Taibbi, Greenwald et al.'s gloating is primarily against their premature ejaculation -- although their glee is also reprehensible under the circumstances.But here is the thing about tin-foil hat thinking: if you are going to...

Trump and his supporters have been loudly claiming that the Barr letter about the Mueller report has shown "no collusion!" which has been shouted loudly from the rooftops, with many supposedly respectable sources such as the New York Times agreeing with this assessment, thus supporting the long running Trump/Hannity repeated claim.But I note that the big headline on this morning's Washington Post was "Mueller Finds No Conspiracy," not "No Collusion."  Indeed, a careful reading of the clearly...

As everyone knows by now, President Trump has been totally "exonerated" for everything, ever, by a four-page letter from William Barr, the Attorney General whom he appointed expressly to "exonerate" him. With regard to potential obstruction-of-justice, on page three of his letter, Barr cited Special Counsel Mueller's statement that "while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him."Understandably, Trump's allies and surrogates are...

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),...