Tag Archives: Uncategorized

from Dean Baker When I do one of my diatribes about how our protectionist barriers allow U.S. doctors to earn twice as much as doctors in other wealthy countries, I invariably get complaints from doctors and their friends asking why I don’t go after the really big bucks people on Wall Street. The answer of course is that I do, but the bloated paychecks on Wall Street are not a reason to pay an extra $100 billion a year ($750 per household) to doctors in the United States. But it is true...

The last (I hope) extract from the climate change chapter of Economic Consequences of the Pandemic. I’m in two minds about whether this is really needed. The group of pro-nuclear environmentalists seems to be shrinking towards a hard core who can’t be convinced (and some of them, like Shellenberger turn out to have been concern trolls all along). But every now and then I run across people who seem open-minded enough, but haven’t caught up with the bad news on nuclear. Debates...

from Lars Syll Modern econometrics is fundamentally based on assuming — usually without any explicit justification — that we can gain causal knowledge by considering independent variables that may have an impact on the variation of a dependent variable. This is however, far from self-evident. Often the fundamental causes are constant forces that are not amenable to the kind of analysis econometrics supplies us with. As Stanley Lieberson has it in Making It Count: One can always say...

from Asad Zaman Among the many dimensions I have listed in “New Directions in Macroeconomics”, the most important is the moral dimension. If we take Adam Smith as the founder, economics was born as a branch of moral philosophy. However, modern economists claim that the subject is purely positive and scientific, and makes no value judgments. Before we can discuss moral dimensions of economic theories, we must counter this claim, and establish that, contrary to claims made by economists,...

Τον Ιούνιο του 2020 έγραψα ένα κείμενο στην ιστοσελίδα του FB των αποφοίτων του Βαρβακείου με αφορμή εκτεταμένα αλγεινά φαινόμενα βλακωδών παρλατών περί «αριστείας» και αξιολύπητου γλυψίματος κυβερνητικών και συστημικών πολιτικών και προσώπων με το πρόσχημα της προβολής αποφοίτων του σχολείου. Προκάλεσε τις θετικές αντιδράσεις πολλών συναποφοίτων δείχνοντας, κατά την ταπεινή μου γνώμη, ότι το κριτικό πνεύμα που μάθαμε στα χρόνια μας στο Βαρβάκειο εξακολουθεί να υπάρχει. Φυσικά...

Another excerpt from the climate chapter of my book-in-progress, Economic Consequences of the Pandemic. Comments, constructive criticism and compliments all appreciated. Economists have long been enamoured of simple and universal solutions to the problem of greenhouse gases emissions. The key to these solutions is imposing a price on emissions, through a carbon tax or an emissions trading scheme. With a carbon tax, firms are required to pay a fixed price for each ton of carbon...

from Lars Syll The “prisoner’s dilemma” is a familiar concept to just about everyone who took Econ 101 … Yet no one’s ever actually run the experiment on real prisoners before, until two University of Hamburg economists tried it out in a recent study comparing the behavior of inmates and students. Surprisingly, for the classic version of the game, prisoners were far more cooperative than expected. Menusch Khadjavi and Andreas Lange put the famous game to the test for the first time ever,...

by New Deal democrat Weekly Indicators for November 30 – December 4 at Seeking Alpha My Weekly Indicators post is up at Seeking Alpha. There is more evidence of weakening of the coincident data, probably as the result of the completely out of control pandemic. Some of that is probably due to new restrictions, some to winter weather causing people to curtail some activities, and some (probably most of all) to people becoming much more...

2020 has not been a good year for thermal coal. Trends that were already underway have accelerated as a result of the pandemic. As the energy source with the highest marginal cost of operation coal has borne the brunt of reductions in electricity demand. As a result, planned closures have been brought forward, and new closures announced. Financial institutions have announced ever more stringent divestiture policies, making new coal mines and coal-fired power stations increasingly...