Economics Roundtable

As you can probably imagine, I was tickled pink today to learn that the progenitor of one of the most enduring communist dictatorships of our time has finally recanted, acknowledging that Cuba’s economy, largely owned and directed by the state (in absence of price mechanisms), is a failure:

HAVANA ...

That is the title of today’s Wall Street Journal Symposium [Gated]. And the overwhelming answer from preeminent monetary economists? Nothing.

Not that they didn’t answer the question. Most of the panelists’ answers amount to the Fed remaining passive. Here is John Talyor:

To establish Fed policy going ...

James Kwak and I will agree on one thing with respect to his recent post: people who have taken econ 101 will tend to believe that price gouging in a disaster is a good thing. Where Kwak and I disagree is whether price gouging actually is a good thing. ...

I know it when I see it

~Potter Stewart, 1964

Can it really make sense to vote for the opposite party just because the economy happens to be bad?

Kevin Drum notes the particular oddity that Americans think the poor economy is George Bush’s fault yet plan to vote for ...

Both inspiration and devastation in this story from Smithsonian magazine:

“I’m very lucky to be alive,” Zéphirin told me late one afternoon in the Monnin gallery, where he was putting the finishing touches on his tenth painting since the quake. “I was in a bar on the afternoon of the ...

There was an article last week in the New York Times about economists calling for the government to simply allow house prices fall and reach their bottom, an idea which is gathering more and more support. I think this is a bad idea because the real costs falling home ...

In an update to his popular post, which is causing some interesting commentary on Twitter, my co-blogger Karl Smith has this to say:

My argument is no, this isn’t just another bad experience. Its a failure of our most basic institutions and is leading to pure loss.

Indeed, I think ...

Will make our lives less worth living until our eventual death anyway.

Paul Krugman complains that its not only the Austerity crowd but the Tight Money crowd that’s switching its tune on the bond markets

So will the OECD call for a drastic shift toward expansionary [monetary] policies, since the ...

There is a critical point that I fear the commentariat is just not getting. In my darker moments I fear that some of my fellow economists aren’t getting it either but we aren’t going to go there.

Look at these two graphs ...

Bob Wright often argues that the evolution of life on Earth looks a whole lot like the product of design.

. . .� biologists agree that a strictly physical system or process—whose workings can be wholly explained in material terms—can have such extraordinary characteristics that it is fair ...