December 2010
7 posts
3 tags
on libertarian whimsy
One of the economics webloggers whom I read regularly is Arnold Kling at EconLog. I don’t remember how I first found my way to “the log,” but it was probably the fault of either Tyler Cowen or Brad DeLong. Whichever one it was links Kling with regular frequency. I thusly became predisposed to agree with Kling on most topics. He is, after all, one of those dee-lightful...
5 tags
in which we are surprised when revenue-reduction...
Gary Becker writes:
Forecasters got a shock on Friday with the release of preliminary data that indicated the unemployment rate rose a little from 9.6% to 9.8% in November rather than remaining stable or even falling a little. Although data for one month alone do not mean much because of large measurement errors, the average growth in employment over the past three months has been slow, and the...
warmaking on the margins
Michael O’Hanlon writes:
During the 1960s, national defense spending was typically 8 to 9 percent of gross domestic product (GDP); in the 1970s, it began at around 8 percent and declined to just under 5 percent of GDP; during the Reagan buildup of the 1980s, it reached 6 percent of GDP before declining somewhat as the Cold War ended. In the 1990s, it started at roughly 5 percent and wound...
4 tags
An economics refresher
Brad DeLong offers to bring us back up to speed on the fundamentals of economics.
What Do Econ 1 Students Need to Remember Most from the Course?
“Economics deals with those things that we want but that are “scarce.” We economists care about commodities whenever there are not enough of them for all of us to be satisfied that we have all that we want. Under those circumstances...
http://weburbanist.com/2010/11/10/parkour-for-lazie... →
nod to Cheap Talk
writing on the wall
Mike Masnick writes:
Whether or not you agree with Assange or the entire concept of Wikileaks (and, like many others, I have some ambivalence about the operation itself), it is important to understand the deeper level of what’s going on here. It’s what happens when a centralized system, based on locking up information and creating artificial barriers, runs smack into a decentralized,...