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March 2004
A Monthly Archive (29 entries)
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March 31, 2004
Energy, Environment, Resources
Arnold Kling
Earlier, I posted on the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. Nick Schulz has some more on the gas price issue. Ketchup at a retail grocery store is $0.16 an ounce meaning it rings in at an impressive $20.48 a gallon, almost ten... MORE
In an earlier post, I said that health care funding should focus on outcomes, rather than procedures. David Cutler has thoughts along the same lines. Why don't we pay a little bit more to make sure that people don't have... MORE
Institutional Economics
Arnold Kling
Our parent site, Econlib, now has a sister site, The Online Library of Liberty, a library of classic works. You can browse Books and Essays. Among the writers whose work is presented and discussed is Thomas Hobbes, who offered a... MORE
March 30, 2004
Energy, Environment, Resources
Arnold Kling
With oil prices high, should the Strategic Petroleum Reserve be reduced? Steve Antler criticizes John Kerry for making such a suggestion. In contrast, Fred Singer has called the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, a wasteful effort by government to protect against an... MORE
March 29, 2004
Growth: Causal Factors
Arnold Kling
Andrew David Chamberlain points to a World Bank study written by Andrei Shleifer, among others, of barriers to entrepreneurship. Countries with heavier regulation of entry have higher corruption and larger unofficial economies, but not better quality of public or private... MORE
March 26, 2004
Regulation and Subsidies
Arnold Kling
The issue of bundling has been in the news recently. For example, the Europeans want to punish Microsoft for bundling a media player with its operating system. Professor Bainbridge supports the regulators in this case. Prohibiting Microsoft from bundling, say,... MORE
March 25, 2004
Economics of Education
Arnold Kling
Virginia Postrel describes recent research in the issue of teacher pay and teacher quality. One paper is by Sean P. Corcoran and others. Postrel summarizes the results as: the chances of getting a really smart teacher have gone down substantially.... MORE
Economics of Health Care
Arnold Kling
Last night, I went to hear a talk by Regina E. Herzlinger, author of Consumer-driven Health Care. Her philosophy of health care is the opposite of the conventional wisdom that I derided in America is Crazy. The talk was given... MORE
Fiscal Policy
Arnold Kling
Wayne Angell argues that the Clinton Administration paid down the Federal debt too quickly. The recent peak in federal debt as a percentage of GDP averaging 49% from 1993 to 1996, compared with the all-time peak in 1946 of 109%,... MORE
March 24, 2004
International Trade
Arnold Kling
Netscape founder Marc Andreessen has some suggestions, including: * Innovation and entrepreneurialism -- anything new we tend to be really good at * Software design * Advanced chip design (CPUs, 3D accelerators, etc.) * Networking systems design ... * Law... MORE
Macroeconomics
Arnold Kling
A while back, Paul Krugman published a graph that appeared to show that the employment forecasts of the Bush Administration were implausible. Drawing the same graph, but using an earlier start date, James K. Galbraith refutes that analysis. As Galbraith... MORE
March 22, 2004
Labor Market
Arnold Kling
The grocery workers in the Washington DC area are thinking about going on strike. The president of the union representing 18,000 Washington area Giant Food and Safeway Inc. employees believes "there is a serious possibility" that upcoming contract negotiations will... MORE
Energy, Environment, Resources
Arnold Kling
Lynne Kiesling writes, our water use has not gone up in 20 years. If we paid prices for water that reflected the true cost of its use, and if farmers could transfer their property rights over water to non-agricultural users,... MORE
March 19, 2004
Economics of Health Care
Arnold Kling
Do high health care costs in the United States prove that free-market health care does not work? Steve Verdon responds. The Medicare program subsidizes health care consumption for some of the largest consumers of health care dollars. When you subsidize... MORE
March 18, 2004
International Trade
Arnold Kling
Brink Lindsey offers "one-stop shopping" for a list of common complaints about trade and outsourcing and their refutations. One excerpt: Again and again, serious and influential voices have raised the cry that the sky is falling. It never does. The... MORE
March 15, 2004
Finance: stocks, options, etc.
Arnold Kling
Brad DeLong says that in the housing market, one person's capital gain is another person's capital loss. Yes, many people who have refinanced have now boosted their own consumption spending because they feel (and are) richer. But why haven't those... MORE
March 14, 2004
Labor Market
Arnold Kling
The divergence between the payroll survey and the household survey of employment has been a big issue over the past year. The Bureau of Labor Statistics recently offered its analysis. The whole article is worth reading. Here are a few... MORE
March 11, 2004
International Macroeconomics: Exchange Rates, International Debt, etc.
Arnold Kling
Brad DeLong and I were sitting East-West, with Warren Mosler and Thomas E. Nugent sitting North-South. Somehow, we got to two ad hominems, doubled and redoubled. Let's review the bidding. Mosler and Nugent opened with Understanding that government deficits add... MORE
Fiscal Policy
Arnold Kling
In the essay I referred to in my previous post, I also write A President who has only added to future entitlement obligations ought to be judged as having acted to increase taxes. To call this Administration a tax cutter... MORE
Macroeconomics
Arnold Kling
I argue that criticizing the Administration's employment forecasts is hypocritical. suppose you were to do a blindfold test. Give an economist the actual output growth of 7.8 percent over three years (roughly 2.5 percent per year) and ask the economist... MORE
March 9, 2004
Behavioral Economics and Rationality
Arnold Kling
David Weinberger has some thoughts about eBay. I've lost bids to auction snipers. As a customer, I feel cheated, even though, of course, I could take a sniper's eye-view of the transaction. Even if letting robots game the auction doesn't... MORE
Information Goods, Intellectual Property
Arnold Kling
What do you call a technology that looks promising but always lets you down? In this essay, I point out that one example is micropayments. Another example, I argue, is virtual classrooms. Most web-based education software seems designed to enable... MORE
Labor Market
Arnold Kling
Robert Barro tosses in his $.02 about the divergence between payroll and household employment growth: since the peak of payroll employment in March 2001, household employment has risen by 700,000, while payroll has fallen by 2.4 million, so that household... MORE
March 8, 2004
Behavioral Economics and Rationality
Arnold Kling
Robert Shiller thinks that people ought to be saving more. According to a recent study by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), household saving rates declined between 1984 and 2001 in Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Finland, Italy, Japan,... MORE
March 7, 2004
Fiscal Policy
Arnold Kling
Noam Scheiber argues that the Bush tax cuts in fact were stimulative. Liberals in Congress and at places like the Economic Policy Institute complain that the Bushies should have targeted the bulk of their tax cuts toward the working poor... MORE
Labor Market
Arnold Kling
Tim Kane has written a timely paper on the behavior of the payroll survey, which is the source of data showing disappointing employment numbers. The key point is this: The payroll survey double-counts any individual who changes jobs during the... MORE
March 5, 2004
Macroeconomics
Arnold Kling
There is a silly controversy concerning when the recession began. The White House has argued revisions last year to economic data meant the fourth quarter of 2000 would be more accurate, a change that would shift the start of the... MORE
March 4, 2004
Social Security
Arnold Kling
In this essay, I argue that Congress treats economists the way the Inquisition treated heretics. Why do the Inquisitors have it in for economists? Ultimately, politicians tell the people what we want to hear. They think that we want to... MORE
March 2, 2004
Macroeconomics
Arnold Kling
I turn out to be more Keynesian than Brad DeLong, at least in an old-fashioned sense. In a long and interesting post, Brad DeLong finds little difference between new Keynesians and monetarists. The former he describes as believing in five... MORE
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