Lynne Kiesling A couple of weeks ago I linked to a post from Ed Glaeser on his research on urban dynamism. Glaeser has posted a follow-up to his initial comments. He asks: For decades, economists have debated the “ Dutch Disease” and other ailments associated with too much success. The discovery of natural gas in the …
Lynne Kiesling Ambrose Bierce’s Devil’s Dictionary is a true literary gem. Also known as the “cynic’s word book”, it complies witty and biting definitions that Bierce contributed to magazines starting in the 1880s, with all of the bluntness and prejudices that you would expect (in other words, if Bierce were writing today he’d certainly offend …
The Devil’s Dictionary Meme Applied to Climate Politics and to Financial Markets Read More »
Lynne Kiesling I’ve mentioned NPR’s Planet Money before, specifically their story on the history of employer-provided health insurance. They do a good job (not perfect, but good) of exploring economics topics for a general audience; they did some very good reporting on the underlying macroeconomic issues in the financial crisis earlier this year (although they …
This American Life/planet Money and Market Dynamics Read More »
Lynne Kiesling Here’s an illustration of several important economic points. Illinois instituted a smoking ban in bars and restaurants in January 2008. One of the arguments for such smoking bans is to spare patrons and employees the negative effects of second-hand smoke. Clearly such a blanket ban has some negative unintended consequences that reduce economic …
Lynne Kiesling The Marriott hotel on Michigan Avenue has been harvesting honey from beehives they have set up on their own roof. They use the honey in an on-site microbrew beer and in some of the dishes they make in their restaurant. What do you think are some of the economic motives driving such a …
Michael Giberson William Easterly writes, “Few people outside academia realize how badly Randomized Evaluation has polarized academic development economists for and against.” That claim seems reasonable enough. I’d bet few people outside academia know what randomized evaluation is. Frankly, I’d bet you could survey economists on the floor of the upcoming American Economic Association meetings …
Easterly on the Civil War in Development Economics Read More »
Michael Giberson James Hamilton, “Will rising oil prices derail the recovery?“: I have no doubt that the problems with financial markets were a bigger factor than oil prices in the striking collapse in output in 2008:Q4 and 2009:Q1. The other approaches to measuring the contribution of oil to the downturn surveyed in my Brookings paper …
Lynne Kiesling Check out this cool new data center plan — locate the servers under a cathedral and use the waste heat to warm the cathedral and the neighboring buildings! This is an established system called district heating, which uses a network of steam or hot water pipes to heat distributed buildings.
Lynne Kiesling If you have not been following the story of leaked emails and documents from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit after their computers were hacked, Maggie Koerth-Baker’s Boing Boing post provides an overview with lots of supporting links. A couple of good overview stories are from the Economist’s most recent issue …
Those Leaked Emails, and the Politicization of Climate Science Read More »
Lynne Kiesling Ed Glaeser has a very interesting post and an accompanying working paper on differences in entrepreneurship across cities. His post covers some history of entrepreneurship in economics (he mentions Smith, Marshall, Schumpeter, Knight, and Chinitz, but not Cantillon), how to measure entrepreneurship, and some preliminary results from their working paper: The big fact …
Ed Glaeser on Why Some Cities Are More Entrepreneurial Read More »
Copyright © 2022 Knowledge Problem Archive