Month: April 2014

Daniel Kuehn: Facts & other stubborn things: Making predictions is difficult, particularly about the future: “Bob Murphy has an interesting comment….

“If Bastiat came back today, I am not saying he would call himself an anarcho-capitalist, but I’m pretty sure he would not be a ‘liberal’ in the way Rush Limbaugh and Rachel Maddow use the term.”…

I am of course not claiming that libertarians don’t have a claim to the word “liberal”. They clearly do…. Bastiat–a liberal in his own time–would be a libertarian today…. I have no dispute with Bob about that…

Well, Daniel may not dispute, but I do!

Read the whole thing, and you find passages like:

Continue reading “Frederic Bastiat as a Modern Liberal; or, Market vs. Government Failure: Monday Focus: April 21, 2014” →

Must-Reads:

1. Jonathan Chait: Obama Declares Obamacare Victory: “The fate of the Affordable Care Act has followed a pattern that I’ve argued, tracks the great polling debate of 2012, the main difference being the lack of a single clarifying event, akin to the election, to instantaneously discredit one side…. Ross Douthat has a column today retrenching the definition of failure. The most notable thing about it is the conservative ground he’s surrendered…. He hangs on the possibility of future failure–Congress may one day repeal the medical device tax or the Independent Payment Advisory Board’s recommendations, or scale back the Cadillac tax…. For all the Sturm und Drang, implementing a successful health-care reform was not actually very hard, for the simple reason that the United States started with the worst-designed health-care system in the industrialized world. When you spend far more on health care than any country, and you’re also the only advanced democracy that denies people access to medical care, it’s incredibly easy to design a better system…. The health-care system still has lots of problems, beginning with the 5 million poor Americans cruelly denied health care by red state Republicans…. If it’s so easy to massively improve health care, why didn’t it happen before? Because passing a health-care reform through Congress is incredibly hard…. The triumphs of Obamacare were designing a plan that could acceptably compensate the losers and generating the resources to cover the uninsured without alienating those with insurance. Designing and passing Obamacare was a project requiring real policy and political genius. Implementing it was easy.”

2. Lars E.O. Svensson: Ingen Kunde ha Förutsagt… * Deflation in Sweden: Questions and answers * The Possible Unemployment Cost of Average Inflation below a Credible Target * Why Is [High] Household Debt an Additional Reason for Fulfilling the Inflation Target?

3. Debate at KSU: Mark Thoma vs. Steve Williamson: The Federal Reserve’s Monetary Policy Decisions since the Ending of the Great Recession in 2009

Continue reading “Things to Read on the Evening of April 19, 2014” →

Jonathan Chait: Obama Declares Obamacare Victory: “The fate of the Affordable Care Act has followed a pattern that…

…I’ve argued, tracks the great polling debate of 2012, the main difference being the lack of a single clarifying event, akin to the election, to instantaneously discredit one side…. Ross Douthat has a column today retrenching the definition of failure. The most notable thing about it is the conservative ground he’s surrendered…. He hangs on the possibility of future failure–Congress may one day repeal the medical device tax or the Independent Payment Advisory Board’s recommendations, or scale back the Cadillac tax…. For all the Sturm und Drang, implementing a successful health-care reform was not actually very hard, for the simple reason that the United States started with the worst-designed health-care system in the industrialized world. When you spend far more on health care than any country, and you’re also the only advanced democracy that denies people access to medical care, it’s incredibly easy to design a better system…. The health-care system still has lots of problems, beginning with the 5 million poor Americans cruelly denied health care by red state Republicans…. If it’s so easy to massively improve health care, why didn’t it happen before? Because passing a health-care reform through Congress is incredibly hard…. The triumphs of Obamacare were designing a plan that could acceptably compensate the losers and generating the resources to cover the uninsured without alienating those with insurance. Designing and passing Obamacare was a project requiring real policy and political genius. Implementing it was easy.

Lars E.O. Svensson: Ingen Kunde ha Förutsagt…

• Deflation in Sweden: Questions and answers
• The Possible Unemployment Cost of Average Inflation below a Credible Target
• Why Is [High] Household Debt an Additional Reason for Fulfilling the Inflation Target?

Debate at KSU: Mark Thoma vs. Steve Williamson:

• Paul Krugman
• Jonathan Chait

And:

• Joan Walsh

I’m on the only one who finds the different liberal and conservative responses to the launch of Ezra Klein and company’s http://vox.com and to Nate Silver and company’s http://fivethirtyeight.com (and, no doubt, David Leonhardt’s forthcoming The Upshot, and to Jonathan Cohn’s ) to be profoundly alarming?

Continue reading “Paul Krugman and Jonathan Chait Are Spending This Morning Worrying About Whether a Technocratic Dialogue Is Even Possible Today: Friday Focus: April 18, 2014” →

Must-Reads:

1. German Lopez: White House: 8 million people signed up for Obamacare: “Eight million people signed up for Obamacare’s insurance marketplaces between October and April 15, President Barack Obama announced Thursday. The number comes in higher than the 7 million enrollees budget forecasters had predicted and after HealthCare.gov’s botched rollout, which led to few sign-ups during the first couple months. The White House reported a surge of signups toward the end of March, as the March 31 deadline for open enrollment loomed. The surge apparently continued until April 15, the extended deadline for those who ran into technical problems signing up by the end of March 31…”

2. John Aziz: The World’s Dumbest Idea: Taxing Solar Energy: “In a setback for the renewable energy movement the state House in Oklahoma this week passed a bill that would levy a new fee on those who generate their own energy through solar equipment or wind turbines on their property. The measure, which sailed to passage on a near unanimous vote after no debate, is likely to be signed into law by Republican Gov. Mary Fallin…. Now utility firms in Oklahoma say they just want to be compensated for use of their infrastructure. But renewable energy fed back into the grid is ultimately doing utility companies a service. Solar generates in the daytime, when demand for electricity is highest, thereby alleviating pressure during peak demand. Oklahoma is not alone. Last year, Arizona enacted a similar law. Legislators in Spain tried to do the same thing. The pushback against renewable energy, it seems, is already here…

3. Dean Baker: Will the Wall Street Journal Give Ed Lazear Space to Correct His Piece About Falling Work Hours?: “Last month the WSJ ran a column by Ed Lazear, a Stanford economics professor and former chief economist to President Bush, which noted the decline in the length of the average workweek between the fall and the most recent data from February. The piece noted that if labor demand was measured in hours, we had lost the equivalent of 100,000 jobs over the prior six months. He discussed possible causes for this decline and highlighted the incentives created by the Affordable Care Act. While some of us at the time questioned the plausibility of this story and noted the likely effect of the weather on reducing workweeks in January and February, we got the question resolved when the March data was released this month. The entire decline in average hours was reversed. The question is whether the WSJ will allow Mr. Lazear a follow-up piece to point out that his earlier concerns about the Affordable Care Act leading to a reduction in the length of the average workweek had apparently been wrong.”

4. Thomas Piketty: Extreme Inequality Is Useless for Growth: http://www.youtube.com/nxJvw5HlDs8

Continue reading “Things to Read at Lunchtime on April 18, 2014” →

German Lopez: White House: 8 million people signed up for Obamacare: “Eight million people signed up…

…for Obamacare’s insurance marketplaces between October and April 15, President Barack Obama announced Thursday. The number comes in higher than the 7 million enrollees budget forecasters had predicted and after HealthCare.gov’s botched rollout, which led to few sign-ups during the first couple months. The White House reported a surge of signups toward the end of March, as the March 31 deadline for open enrollment loomed. The surge apparently continued until April 15, the extended deadline for those who ran into technical problems signing up by the end of March 31…

…at Trader Vic’s: and his hair was perfect!

Nick Rowe writes:

Nick Rowe: Mackerels and Money: “Arnold Kling asks….

…Why should the M in MV=PY stand for money, and not mackerels? Why can’t an excess demand for mackerel cause a recession? Why can’t an excess supply of other goods be matched by an excess demand for mackerel? Keynesians don’t know the answer to this question either…. There is one exception to what I say about Keynesians, but it’s an exception that proves the rule. Like a full moon to a werewolf, the mention of Say’s Law turns Brad DeLong into a monetarist; he starts talking about velocity, and quoting Hume, Fisher, and Friedman…

Well, I can think of two responses. First, response 1: http://youtu.be/AbmS5Pq6e7A

Second, response 2:

Continue reading “I Saw a Monetarist Drinking a Pina Colada…: Thursday Focus: April 17, 2014” →