Tag Archives: Featured Stories

I’m teaching “Economics for Non-Economists” this semester. This is an interesting experiment, and is strongly testing my belief that you can teach economics without mathematics so long as people understand graphs and tables. (It appears that people primarily learn how to read graphs and tables in mathematics-related courses. Did everyone except me know this?) Since economics is All About Trade-offs, our textbook notes that minimum wage increases should...

Can Nudging Become A New Road To Serfdom? Last weekend I attended a conference at NYU Law School on “Behavioral Economics and the New Paternalism, organized by Austrian economist Mario Rizzo and classical liberal law professor Richard Epstein. It included economists, lawyers, philosophers, and a couple of psychologists.  While there was a range of views present a theme for many and especially of the organizers was bashing the ideas about “libertarian...

A Teachable Moment: The Importance of Meta-Learning Today’s New York Times has a fine article by Manil Suri about math education and the development of reasoning skills.  Its concluding point is that, while the general contribution of the first to the second is weaker than you might think, math instruction can be improved by bringing the math-reasoning tests themselves into the classroom.  I’m pretty confident that Suri is right, since I’ve seen...

Trump and his administration love to brag about the number of jobs created since he became president.  But the only reason he gets away with claiming that a record number of jobs have been created since he took office is the poor job the press does reporting economic data. It only takes a quick glance at the data to see that job creation under Trump has been essentially identical to Obama’s record during the expansion phase of this cycle.  Excluding the...

A Half Century Ago Today  A half century ago today Martin Luther King, Jr. was shot dead in Memphis, Tennessee.  This remains one of the saddest events in our history.  This will not be a long post other than remembering this event that ended the life of this great man.  I have only two observations. One is that in yesterday’s Washington Post there was a long article about how King’s family believe he was not shot by James Earl Ray and that it was...

Our Depleted National Defense Budget? Our title is perhaps the most obnoxious line in the Hoover Five oped per some of the appropriately harsh comments to Cochrane’s post, which alas I did not cover here. Before I do so, let me turn the microphone over to Jonathan Chait: It is a foundational belief of Republican Party doctrine that tax cuts cannot have any adverse impact on the national debt. Indeed, Republicans have invented a new language in which...

Why “Entitlement” Cuts and Not Tax Increases Again? John Cochrane has to remind us that he co-authored a really bizarre oped: Unless Congress acts to reduce federal budget deficits, the outstanding public debt will reach $20 trillion a scant five years from now, up from its current level of $15 trillion. That amounts to almost a quarter of million dollars for a family of four, more than twice the median household wealth. This string of perpetually rising...

This Is Tax Simplification? I happen to support tax simplification that does not increase regressivity of the tax system, and I recognize that there are a few parts of the Trump tax change that do that.  But mostly it massively increases regressivity, along with massively increasing the budget deficit at a time when we are not too far from full employment.  As it is, however, the new tax law turns out to be riddled with all kinds of ridiculous...

 I pour some cold water on 2018 midterm overoptimism In the wake of Conor Lamb’s election victory in Pennsylvania last Tuesday night, some Democratic partisans are suggesting that every GOP-held seat from a district that is less than trump +20% is in play. Hold your horses. The results of last June’s special election in Georgia, in which GOPer Karen Handel defeated Democrat Jon Ossoff show that there is a roadmap to the GOP minimizing their losses in...

The Grand Illusion 2.0 Introductory note: this is a very long epistle. But I think my point needs to be made fully and at length. Before you go further, in fairness here is the TL:DR version: Advocates of free trade and globalization were taken aback a week ago by the assumption by China’s President Xi Jinping of rule for life. This was because it runs completely contrary to their theory that free trade leads to economic liberalization, which in turn...