The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design. - F.A. Hayek
Posted in Economics Problems on Apr 28th, 2008
Jim Bohannon asked me, as a final question, what I would do if I were the world’s economics czar, and to ignore political consequences for a moment. I had something like 15 seconds to answer.
My original answer was: “I’d eliminate my position.” But, as this was talk radio, both he and the listeners wanted to […]
Posted in Economics Problems on Apr 16th, 2008
at the Masters. It was worth every penny.
My father and I had the good fortune of winning tickets to attend a practice round at the 2008 Masters Golf Tournament in Augusta, GA. The tradition-rich golf tournament is so popular with fans that a waiting list for tickets to see the actual tournament was opened in […]
Posted in Economics Problems on Apr 1st, 2008
When you know economics has gone off the deep end:
“The Economics of Brushing Teeth“
Posted in Economics Problems on Jan 25th, 2008
I recently attended a lecture where the speaker showed the Heritage Foundation’s Economic Freedom Index, and showed the now famous chart (scroll down to Chart 4) demonstrating that countries with higher freedom indexes have higher income.While I clearly believe in the importance of property rights and free markets, these sort of indices are little more […]
Posted in Economics Problems on Dec 27th, 2007
One of the reasons government seems to be encroaching upon more and more areas of our private lives (trans-fats, car safety, etc.) is that statists and technocrats have embraced economics! For someone who aspires to be an economic educator this is an odd thing to believe, no? Well, sort of. Like the old proverb says, […]
Posted in Economics Problems on Nov 6th, 2007
This paper considers ordered vector spaces with arbitrary closed cones and establishes a number of characterization results with applications to monotone comparative statics (Topkis (1978), Topkis (1998), Milgrom and Shannon (1994)). By appealing to the fundamental theorem of calculus for the Henstock-Kurzweil integral, we generalize existing results on increasing differences and supermodularity for C1 or […]
Posted in Economics Problems on Oct 24th, 2007
And no it is not our preference for this. It seems that Mr. Smith would have trouble publishing his work in today’s top economics journals.
Of more than 1200 papers published in ten top journals, six percent met a weak criterion of math-free, three percent an intermediate criterion, and only 1.5 percent a strong criterion. General […]
Posted in Behavior, Economics Problems on Aug 6th, 2007
It is very easy for survey respondents to say that they are not happy, or to take positions which seem “out there,” the reason being that people rarely have the proper incentives to reveal how they actually feel about various policies and positions. For example, Robert Frank (e.g. author of Luxury Fever among others) has […]
Posted in Economic Illiteracy, Economics Problems on Aug 3rd, 2007
The List: Five Lies My Economist Told Me
From Foreign Policy Magazine.
Posted in Economics Problems, Macroeconomics, Resources on Jun 21st, 2007
This is the first entry in a continuing series.
Less than two weeks ago, a wonderful couple that I have befriended from work gave birth to a beautiful baby girl. I have been around many sets of new parents, but have yet to come across a couple who were as joyful, proud, and excited at the […]
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