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July 2003
A Monthly Archive (25 entries)
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July 31, 2003
Social Security
Arnold Kling
In testimony before the House Budget Committee, William Gale of the Brookings Institution says, there is another big part of the problem: namely, the sunsets that are in the tax code. If all of those sunsets were removed, revenue would... MORE
Information Goods, Intellectual Property
Arnold Kling
A number of economists and others are defending the idea of a futures market to predict terrorism. This idea was abandoned after Senators objected to it. Hal Varian writes, The Iowa Electronic Markets has been predicting election results for 12... MORE
July 30, 2003
Economics of Education
Arnold Kling
On the topic of vouchers and education, Jim Glass writes, The public school system in the past never worked any better than it does now. Arguably it was worse in the past. ...There's a lot of both selective memory and... MORE
July 29, 2003
Information Goods, Intellectual Property
Arnold Kling
Andrew Odlyzko has an interesting article on price discrimination in the information age. He sees the databases that companies are gathering (from supermarket membership cards, for example) as tools for charging on the basis of price sensitivity. price discrimination will... MORE
July 28, 2003
Finance: stocks, options, etc.
Arnold Kling
What is a safe investment nowadays? Zvi Bodie argues for inflation-indexed government securities. The probability that stocks will perform worse than risk-free investments, such as TIPS or I-Bonds, gets smaller the longer you hold them. After 30 years, there is... MORE
Energy, Environment, Resources
Arnold Kling
Randall ("FuturePundit") Parker takes down hydrogen cars by pointing to a number of scientific studies. The biggest problem with hydrogen as a means to reduce pollution is that it has to be produced from another energy source and the most... MORE
Economics of Education
Arnold Kling
In an essay called Mandatory Libertarianism, I address the distrust of markets voiced by opponents of vouchers in education. opponents asserted that there could not possibly be enough private schools to support a voucher system. However, if education were completely... MORE
July 27, 2003
Referring to Hayek's Competition as a Discovery Procedure, Brad DeLong wrote, this particular essay combines brilliance and antibrilliance in remarkable degrees...The second half wanders off into Hayekian hobbyhorses that I don't think are very helpful. I wish that DeLong would... MORE
July 25, 2003
Income Distribution
Arnold Kling
Some recent articles on income and wealth. Thomas Sowell writes, high tax rates hit people who are currently earning high incomes -- usually late in life, after having worked their way up in their professions over a period of decades.... MORE
July 24, 2003
International Trade
Arnold Kling
Peter Gallagher wrote this on his site, but it still counts as a comment. I had asked how one might explain trade and comparative advantage to a journalist. I usually use...the story about the busy lawyer and her secretary. The... MORE
July 23, 2003
Productivity, Baumol's cost disease
Arnold Kling
Steve ("econopundit") Antler says that Baumol's Cost Disease is the basis for a new form of class warfare, pitting service producers against goods producers. Much of what's normally called "technical progress" is actually the "iron law" of service pricing in... MORE
July 22, 2003
International Trade
Arnold Kling
The New York Times has several recent articles on international trade. One piece discusses IBM's evaluation of outsourcing. in recent weeks many politicians in Washington, including some in the Bush administration, have begun voicing concerns about the issue during a... MORE
July 21, 2003
Social Security
Arnold Kling
'Jane Galt' links to a paper that was notorious before it was released. Some news outlets reported that the measures of fiscal imbalance created by Jagadeesh Gokhale and Kent Smetters were suppressed by the Bush OMB department because they showed... MORE
July 18, 2003
Growth: Consequences
Arnold Kling
I share Brad DeLong's fascination with anecdotes that illustrate historical comparisons of income. He posted one concerning the pay of a professor one hundred years ago. our professor sees himself as a reasonable and badly underpaid man. He is not... MORE
Social Security
Arnold Kling
Will deferred taxes on IRA's and similar savings plans save the Federal Budget, as a recent draft paper by Michael Boskin seemed to suggest? Not according to William G. Gale , Alan J. Auerbach , and Peter Orszag. Boskin's projections... MORE
International Trade
Arnold Kling
I try to make the classic case for free trade in an article about outsourcing to India. In fact, a good way to attain clarity in discussing the issue of outsourcing is to substitute the phrase "economic activity" for outsourcing:... MORE
Energy, Environment, Resources
Arnold Kling
I may have been on vacation for over a week, but the site was active with comments. On the limits-to-growth thread, Harold wrote, Less land is required for agriculture every year. Even less would be if so many governments would... MORE
July 7, 2003
International Trade
Arnold Kling
I will be on vacation until July 17, and I presume it will take me a few days to get back to blogging. Meanwhile, TechCentralStation has a couple of articles of mine that they may run while I am away.... MORE
Social Security
Arnold Kling
Here is Peter Ferrara's comeback to me on Social Security privatization and stock market scenarios. The views advanced by Kling, however, are not peculiar to him. They reflect what personal account reformers are calling these days the "pain caucus" approach... MORE
July 6, 2003
Economics of Health Care
Arnold Kling
Some recent articles on the economics of health care: Helen Levy and Thomas Deleire compare the expenditure patterns of people who have health insurance to those of people without health insurance. I think that this is a useful reminder that... MORE
July 3, 2003
Energy, Environment, Resources
Arnold Kling
Bjorn Lomborg and Olivier Rubin have an article that concisely challenges the thesis that environmental limits to growth are binding. [the limits-to-growth argument's] real weakness is the underlying assumption that planet Earth has finite, essential resources (such as oil, water,... MORE
Finance: stocks, options, etc.
Arnold Kling
Hal Varian's column cites research on the irrationality of small investors during the dotcom bubble. First, there were significant differences of opinion about the value of Internet stocks, with retail investors tending to be much more optimistic than insiders or... MORE
July 2, 2003
Growth: Causal Factors
Arnold Kling
In the discussion of perspectives on Social Security, I suggested that wages tend to rise with productivity, so that indexing Social Security to wages leads to higher benefits than indexing it to prices. Eric Krieg asked, Arnold, why are wages... MORE
Austrian Economics
Arnold Kling
Europe's proposed constitution is receiving scant attention in mainstream media, but many Web sites that I visit have discussed it. Most of the reviews are mixed, but Marian L. Tupy's opinion is unambiguous. They could have liberalized the rigid European... MORE
July 1, 2003
Monetary Policy
Arnold Kling
Graham Turner claims to offer magical monetary manipulations. A year and a half after the Japanese government introduced its first fiscal stimulus, the yield curve (10-year Japanese government bond yields minus the discount rate) had steepened by nearly 2 percentage... MORE
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