Krlatham’s piece on this Slate article is excellent, and exposes most of the strawmen and mischaracterizations in Yglesias’ article. However, the article was so badly misinformed it deserves a few follow-up comments.
“He was referring to so-called “Austrian economics,” an idiosyncratic passion of his and a set of beliefs that put him at odds with…
Think Progress economist Matt Yglesias is decidedly not an Austrian, and thinks only cranks are. Or, thats what one is led to believe after reading his recent article in Slate. Yglesias uses Slate’s soap box (as other anti-Austrians have in the past) to make a mockery of Austrian economics, presenting straw man after straw man…
On the eve of the new year, this NYT article asked 6 well-known economists—Greg Mankiw, Christina Romer, Tyler Cowen, Robert Frank, Robert Shiller, and Richard Thaler—their views on the economy. The article is too long to examine all their responses, but this post examines some of the problems with Romer’s views. Like a doctor, Romer…
Sometimes economists make analogies to make policies coherent. I find this by line particularly appetizing, imagining Bernanke as a soufflé chef trying to keep his light dessert fluffy. According to Menzie Chinn and Jeffry Frieden, the solution is just to whip in a little inflation to keep that soufflé/economy healthy.
The basic idea they convey…
We hear it all the time: “Buy American”. Indeed, presidential candidate Rick Santorum (who semi-won the Iowa caucuses last night) just received the endorsement of the Conservative Party USA because he apparently “understands that ‘Buy American’ is the key to reviving the US economy”.
I am not going to guess as to Mr. Santorum’s motives…
We’ve been having some profitable discussion on the threat of monopoly in a recent post. In this post, I want to clarify a few things, and perhaps add some additional thoughts.
We have established that is impossible to distinguish “competitive prices” from “monopoly prices” because we only observe the market price. The “competitive price” is…
Piggy-backing off libertas’ post from a few days ago, Think Progress has again made the fallacy of assuming that government expenditures on infrastructure is inherently beneficial to the economy. See quote below:
With borrowing costs low and the nation’s unemployment rate high, infrastructure improvement projects can fix the major problems facing our nation’s roads, bridges,…
Economist Brad DeLong wrote on his blog yesterday about Paul Krugman’s “A Note on the Ricardian Equivalence Argument Against Stimulus.” While the post was quite complex and requires a previous knowledge of Krugman’s argument, he makes one claim I would like to point out.
“He gets it completely wrong because Krugman knows very well who…
Paul Krugman implies that deficit spending is necessary to jumpstart a floundering economy, and in the process repeats the well-known “we owe it to ourselves” fallacy about public debt in his latest piece.
The implication of the “we owe the debt to ourselves” fallacy is that debt isn’t all that harmful or distortionary because, after…
Arms Dealer: “Why should I help you?”
Hunt: “If you don’t help me, we will be facing war.”
Arms Dealer: “But war is good for business.”
Hunt: “Nuclear war?”
Arms Dealer: “…let’s talk.”
I certainly did not expect to be writing about economics in response to seeing Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol last night (a…
