Author name: Michael Giberson

Recessions: An Especially Bad Time to Impose Bad Public Policies

2 Comments / Economics, Liberty, Politics / By

Michael Giberson The WSJ‘s Real Time Economics blog surveyed a few economist reactions to the President’s imposition of dramatically higher tariffs on imported tires.  My favorite, and perhaps most appropriate to our times: In 1930, the Republican controlled House of Rep, in an effort to alleviate the effects of the… Anyone? Anyone?… the Great Depression, …

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The Wisdom of Crowds Has No Use for Predicting the Lottery

4 Comments / Miscellany / By

Michael Giberson English illusionist Derren Brown hosted a live television show last week during which he appeared to have predicted winning lottery numbers.  He subsequently claimed (among other things) that he used the “wisdom of crowds” to generate the prediction. In a follow-up show last night, watched by 3 million people, Brown said he used …

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Reactions to Krugman on the State of Macroeconomics

2 Comments / Economics, Liberty, Politics / By

Michael Giberson Krugman’s long essay in the New York Times Magazine last week continues to stir responses. (All of which are much more substantive and engaging than my supercilious remarks on Jane Smiley’s goofy Marxism in the Huffington Post. ADDED: For a more measured response to Smiley, see Steve Horwitz and Art Carden’s short explanation …

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Jane Smiley: “All I Need to Know About Economics I Learned in Kindergarten”

10 Comments / Economics / By

Michael Giberson Or rather, as Smiley explains in a HuffPost piece, in “Mrs. Ticknor’s Social Studies class in 1962, when I did my report on ‘The Communist Manifesto’ and kept misspelling the word ‘bourgeois’.” She began the essay by complimenting Paul Krugman’s piece in the New York Times Magazine about the sorry state of economics …

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Thomas Friedman Wants to Make the Policy Trains Run on Time

5 Comments / Liberty, Politics / By

Michael Giberson Astonishing. What Thomas Friedman wrote in the New York Times, that is. One-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks. But when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people … it can also have great advantages. That one party can just impose the politically difficult but critically important policies… Astonishing, because while …

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College Football Playoffs and Other Ideas Mike Leach Likes

2 Comments / Professional sports / By

Michael Giberson In the Wall Street Journal, an interview with Texas Tech University football coach Mike Leach: WSJ: You want a 64-team playoff system. That seems crazy. Mr. Leach: It’s only crazy if you are in Division I football. There’s nothing new about this playoff stuff. It would be like crediting me with inventing fire. …

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