October 11, 2009
Britain's Central Planning Death Panels
October 11, 2009
Free Market M.D.
October 11, 2009
Economies of Scale in Compliance
October 11, 2009
Balan's Challenge
October 10, 2009
The Pleasure of Telling Others What to Do
October 10, 2009
Gonick the Great - and How He Could Have Been Greater
October 9, 2009
More Scott Sumner
October 9, 2009
Not From The Onion
October 9, 2009
Thoughts on a Second Stimulus
Economists are doing sociology, psychology, etc. -- and they're calling it "economics". Too bad we can't blow up the departmental boxes and let folks do "research" on whatever they find of interest. But we can't, so given what is being cranked out by the professional sociologists, perhaps this is a second best solution.
The problem is that many economists really don't know much about a lot of non-economic areas. Thus, Levitt's most famous theory -- that legalizing abortion lowered crime -- has taken a terrible beating over the years from those who have looked carefully at the data because Levitt was so ignorant of basic real world events when he made up his theory in 1998 that he hadn't noticed the teen crack crime wave of 1988-1995 among the first cohort born after the legalization of abortion.