Lynne Kiesling In this really outstanding post on FT.com’s Economists Forum, Roman Freedman and Michael Goldberg point out some of the essential flaws of the underlying concept of “rationality” as it is defined and used in economics: The centrepiece of this standard of rationality, the so-called “Rational Expectations Hypothesis”, presumes that economists can model exactly …
Deductive Economic Rationality and Its Limitations Read More »
Lynne Kiesling If you are a wine fan (oenophile if you’re feeling fancy) and you are not reading Dr. Vino regularly, you are missing a real treat. Dr. Vino is a political scientist who, in addition to having a good nose and good taste and a good palate, is an expert on the political economy …
Lynne Kiesling From a good article in today’s New York Times: 2009 is turning out to be a bumper year for new oil discoveries; new oil discoveries always occur, but this year has been unusually fruitful. This quote from the article illustrates the important dynamic intertemporal incentives that price signals provide: These discoveries, spanning five …
Price Signals and Free Markets Lead to Oil Exploration: Who’d a Thunk It? Read More »
Lynne Kiesling As a cyclist, it should come as no surprise that I follow professional cycling pretty closely, and have done for some time. As an economist, it’s a rich laboratory for seeing all kinds of different economic concepts and principles play out. Today I found a good one in an interview with Dave Zabriskie …
An Illustration of Comparative Advantage from Professional Cycling Read More »
Lynne Kiesling A recent essay from legal scholars Todd Zywicki and Josh Wright analyzes the proposed Consumer Financial Protection Agency, and over at Volokh, Ilya Somin adds to their analysis based on his own research. Both pieces are founded on an important core idea — paternalistic regulation that is grounded in the desire to mitigate …
Paternalistic Regulation and the Knowledge Problem Read More »
Lynne Kiesling Grant McCracken always has insightful interpretations of various human/social phenomena, and in this recent post he offers one that he calls “concatenating capitalism“. In discussing “eco-entrepreneur” Joshua Onysko and his work developing his Pangea Organics products, Grant makes a decidedly beyond-Schumpeterian observation about the role of entrepreneurs in transforming the economy and the …
Lynne Kiesling The International Energy Agency has put a quantitative estimate on an effect that we all suspected — this year’s economic recession is contributing to a reduction in global carbon emissions. They estimate that 2009 carbon emissions will be 2 percent lower than 2008, with 75% of the reduction attributable to the economic slowdown …
Lynne Kiesling The title to this post is my phrasing of an idea from Austrian economics that I think is incorrectly ignored in standard macroeconomic theory. I don’t have much insight to add, but this Arnold Kling post had two statements in it that I find very important. The first is Arnold quoting John Quiggin: …
Lynne Kiesling Mike already anticipated me and beat me to it with his great post surveying the Cochrane and Critical Review reactions to what Alex Tabarrok today calls “Krugman’s theya culpa” in the New York Times magazine. I think all of the commentaries that Mike linked to are well worth reading and considering; not surprisingly, …
Tyler’s Nyt Article — Important and Well Worth Reading Read More »
Lynne Kiesling Today the Fraser Institute has released its 2009 Economic Freedom of the World Annual Report. Written by James Gwartney and Robert Lawson, with assistance from other authors as well, this report is one of the most valuable quantitative comparative economic analyses of the form and extent of economic freedom around the world. As …
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