(1) Hmmm, jobs are less likely to be created when unemployment “benefits” are extended.
(2) Hmmm, when you are given retirement health benefits, you save less during your working life.
(3) Jeff Sachs breathes new life into the “geography is the reason nations are poor” story (in the panoply of reasons).
(4) Why I Hate “Economics as Science” episode 2904884: this paper tries to theoretically justify regulatory bans on short-selling. Sciency goodness, right? Of course, the short selling only seems to “harm” firms that are heavily leveraged. So these “sciency good” results don’t suggest that having a fever is the problem, they want to ban the thermometer from reading more than 98.6.
(5) Copyright extensions seem to make authoring more profitable. But isn’t the point of copyright not necessarily to enrich authors, but to benefit readers? What about the number of books and high quality publications? And indeed, wouldn’t high profits perhaps indicate the opposite?
(6) Can peer effects mitigate the public goods “problem?” Evidence from vaccinations.
I liked the BS about the problem of being too close to leverage constraint, another way of saying you borrowed too much, in this case to make insolvent loans.
Saturday morning even Ben Stein admitted he was a nonessential economist in a previous life working for the government. These guys working for the BER make high five figures, right, plus another forty percent fringe? And there are thousands of them, passing data through their systems and producing humus-like byproducts. They get paid by the hour, but get bonuses per page. Other invertebrate similes come to mind…locusts, silkworms.
But yes, if we just handcuff the short sellers, then we will be OK.