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Ben gives a nice talk about happiness research. This snippet is fun: I am reminded of a story about Abraham Lincoln. According to the story, Lincoln was riding with a friend in a carriage on a rainy evening. As they rode, Lincoln told the friend that he believed in what economists would call the utility-maximizing [...]
From Holman Jenkins: Even if you believe saving gasoline is a holy cause, subsidizing electric cars simply is not a substitute for politicians finding the courage to jack up gas prices. Think about it this way: You can double the fuel efficiency of any car by putting a second person in it. You can increase [...]
Harvard’s Dani Rodrik thinks that recent events in Greece may have a deeper meaning: Deep down, the crisis is yet another manifestation of what I call “the political trilemma of the world economy”: economic globalization, political democracy, and the nation-state are mutually irreconcilable. We can have at most two at one time. Democracy is compatible [...]
Joshua Gans alerts me to a minor brouhaha over Neil Gaiman (a fantasy and science fiction writer) charging a library $45,000 to give a talk. Mr Gaiman apparently understands the concept of opportunity cost (principles number 2 in my favorite textbook). Here is how he explains his fees at his website. Q. How can I [...]
Harvard’s Niall Ferguson reviews Richard Posner’s new book. I particularly enjoyed this snippet on the financial reform bills being debated in Congress: Both these measures recall the old British sitcom “Yes Minister,” in which all crises elicited the following response from the clueless politician Jim Hacker: “Something must be done. This is something. Therefore we [...]
Paul Krugman has a thoughtful and thought-provoking column on Greece today. A large part of his argument is that Europe is not an optimal currency area because it lacks a large central government enacting transfer payments among the various regions. That argument will be familiar to students of macroeconomics. (See, e.g., the case study on monetary union in [...]
For the past several days, many towns around Boston have found themselves without drinkable tap water. This increased the demand for bottled water, putting upward pressure on the price. While some policymakers cried foul, this opinion piece endorses the market’s natural response.
For those who don’t know me personally, and haven’t figured it out from my name, I am a Japanese-American woman. I’m closer to forty than to thirty but because of my genes, I look a lot younger than I am. So it’s not uncommon, when people find out what I do, for the response to [...]
