From the monthly archives:

June 2008

Furmanology

June 10, 2008

Chris Hayes quoting Steve Clemons on Obama’s appointment of Jason Furman to head his economic team:

But calling a spade a spade, it’s clear that Furman is no Dean Baker or Robert Blecker or Jared Bernstein—all important economists who have been far more right as of late than the Rubin crowd in anticipating the stress points [...]

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On the Willingness of Past Selves to Let You Buy Them a Beer

June 10, 2008

Steven Berlin Johnson writes:
But sitting here at forty, for whatever reason, I’m imagining it the other way: would 1985 Steven have happily had a beer with the current model? I think he would, and that the pair of us would have hit it off. That’s one measure of success, right? Your continuity with your past [...]

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The World in Your Pocket

June 10, 2008

Here’s something I hadn’t considered:
One early darknet has been termed the “sneakernet”: walking by foot to your friend carrying video cassettes or floppy discs. Nor is the sneakernet purely a technology of the past. The capacity of portable storage devices is increasing exponentially, much faster than Internet bandwidth, according to a principle known as “Kryder’s [...]

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This Week on Free Will: Jonathan Haidt

June 8, 2008

This week on Free Will, I talk with moral psychology big shot Jonathan Haidt about … the psychology of morality! This was fun because I’m a huge Haidt fan. Here’s my unpublished essay written for Reason on why Democrats should pay more attention to Haidt and less to guys like Lakoff.
Interestingly, I think Jon and [...]

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The View from the Bearded Mirror Universe

June 8, 2008

Regarding my latest “liberaltarian” post, John Markley writes:
Will Wilkinson has what I would consider a deeply misguided post about the alleged affinity between libertarianism and big government welfare statist left-liberalism. It’s sort of the bearded mirror universe double of left-libertarianism; left-libertarians like Long, Johnson, Carson, et al. want to radicalize libertarianism and unite it [...]

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Please Disqus

June 6, 2008

I’m trying out the Disqus comment system. Please try it and tell me what you think of it. Perhaps some of you can start fighting with each other, so we can see how the threading works…

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The Error of Productributionism

June 6, 2008

Good stuff from Phillip Whyte:
Many Europeans believe liberal economic reforms are incompatible with social justice. The US and the UK, they point out, have more liberal markets for products and labour than in continental Europe – but also higher levels of poverty and income inequality. European countries therefore face a choice. They can either free [...]

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Political Philosophy and Evidence

June 6, 2008

There is an interesting discussion at Public Reason about coming from both the discussion of David Estlund’s new book and a post by Nicole Hassoun about the role of the social scientific (using that term very broadly) evidence in political philosophy. I’ve got a lot of thoughts about that. Here’s one largely ad hominem thought.
There [...]

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Baptists, Bootleggers, and Global Warming

June 4, 2008

Some of you might be interested in this 2001 essay from Bruce Yandle. The analysis applies to an international scheme under Kyoto, but the logic of a national permit system is the same.
This isn’t just crude public choice theory. It accounts for actual corporate and political behavior rather well. Journalist Tim Carney has been doing [...]

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More on Carbon Policy Equivalence

June 4, 2008

Please read Arnold Kling.
My sympathies in economics lie with the so-called “new institutionalists.” I think institutionalists are going to  see more clearly than neoclassicals the rather big difference between a carbon tax and a whole new market institution for trade in government-created and government-rationed permits.
But let’s back up a little, to the pre-applied political economy [...]

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Games Within Games

June 4, 2008

Stephen Dubner asks an intriguing question:
Pretend for a minute that you have done something to put yourself in jeopardy and are facing a real-life Prisoner’s Dilemma. Now pretend additionally that you get to choose your partner in the dilemma. There are three people to choose from. You cannot see or talk directly to the three [...]

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Equivalent In Your Dreams

June 4, 2008

I understand the theoretical argument for the equivalence of cap and trade and the carbon tax in conditions of full information and perfect compliance, but I think it’s sort of crazy to think they’re equivalent in any meaningful empirical way. Tyler Cowen helpfully explains why.
Meanwhile, Reason Foundation economist Shikha Dalmia has a good op-ed in [...]

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Let Slip the Dogs of Kvetch!

June 4, 2008

In today’s Marketplace commentary, I maintain we should all feel free to grouse about the economy, whether or not we’re officially in recession.

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Sausage, Anyone?

June 3, 2008

Jim Manzi braves the tedium of typing in a partial list of exemptions and carve outs inside the cap-and-trade bill working through Congress. It is not a small list. He concludes:
Calling some of these carve-outs “transition” assistance is pretty funny, since they extend out to 2030 for the oil, natural gas, power generating and manufacturing [...]

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Remittances

June 2, 2008

Please direct your attention to this excellent post on the economics of remittances by YouNotSneaky! (for my money far and away the best anonymous econblogger):
But what about the argument that remittances are all biscuits and gravy with tiny bits of sausage in it? Welllll, no. Sort of. I mean, yes, but, let’s think about things [...]

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Kindlenomics

June 2, 2008

From the Post’s article about e-books:
“We don’t see people buying both versions,” one publishing executive told Wyatt. “I think there is almost a one-to-one cannibalization.”
Curious. Could it be that there exist people who will buy a $9.99 electronic version but would not have bought the $19.95 paper version? Yes! For I am one of those [...]

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Uncooperative Collectivsm

June 2, 2008

Gated summaries of gated papers are annoying, but the result is interesting, so I thought I’d pass this along:
Put four Boston students-all strangers-in a game where they must distribute tokens among themselves using rules that reward both selfish and cooperative moves; allow them to punish each other by taking back tokens (albeit at a cost [...]

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