Exponential Economist Meets Finite Physicist | Do the Math

Exponential Economist Meets Finite Physicist | Do the Math:

Interesting piece, but not very mindful of history. The Malthusians have been proven wrong time and again. Physical limits exist, but 400 years is a long time. Plus, geoengineering is already here. A trumped up straw-man "debate" written from one side of the issue does not much convince me.

Some links on teaching Principles of Economics

We're not out to get our students (Art Carden).

Property rights are probably the most important economic concept ignored by most principles courses. An interesting piece on property rights and karaoke (NPR).

Sometimes economists get principles of economics questions wrong (Tabarrok); sometimes economic researchers claiming that economists get principles of economics questions wrong write the question wrong (Cowen); sometimes there's more than one answer (Decker via Depken). Lesson: we have to be thoughtful about writing the questions we ask students.

Finally, a couple of unrelated random hits: Does the Current Account Still Matter? (Mehrling); some facts about Obama's first-term record - the right and left are both wrong (Sullivan).

Unmanned Commercial Air?

From Freakonomics. I can explain why I don't like this idea in one sentence: I want the person flying and controlling my plane to have his ass to lose just as much as I have mine - it's called incentive compatibility.

Links

Favorite shows by political persuasion (Entertainment Weekly). A little surprised R's dislike South Park so. It's pretty strongly libertarian, but I guess Jesus trumps liberty.
Job market advice for academics from UW (Econbrowser).
Moneyball (Grantland). Maybe they shouldn't of published all their secrets.
Higher speed limits? Probably not (MR). The first comment is amusing, albeit not very aware of forensic economics.
The video game business (Economist). I suspect gaming has been profitable through the recession because it is an inferior good.
A couple of more serious links on political unrest, recessions and inequality (Economist), and the impacts of offshoring on inequality and education (VoxEU).

Some Links

Is religion happiness insurance? (VOX) Does Dr. Frey's self-plagiarized work railing against self-plagiarism discredit him?
A counter-cyclical asset?(WSJ)

...recent data show diaper sales are slowing and sales of diaper-rash ointment are rising.

Does Republican tax profligacy in the short run signal support for higher taxes in the long run (or worse - that they care more about their own electability than about the public)? The conservative Tyler Cowen says yes.

candidates are more worried about having to publicly endorse tax increases than they are about the tax increases themselves. If that’s true, it is all the more reason to watch out for our pocketbooks; it means that the candidates are protecting themselves rather than the taxpayers

Cowen dislikes the Keynesian IS-LM model; DeLong does. Big surprise. My two cents: It's easy to toss peanuts and point out flaws in economic models because every model has flaws - flaws that are well-known even  to the people who come up with them. They have flaws precisely because they are models: they are abstractions from the real world. Like George E. P. Box said, "All models are false, but some are useful."

Some links

Politics and Well being (Economix)
College and the wealth gap (Freakonomics)
Spending less on charity (Economix) An argument for greater redistribution during recessions?

Links I need to get out of my tabs

If the IRS discovered the quadratic formula
A couple of links on the Fed defying the Republicans' silly plea (Economix and Free Exchange)
Whole foods is messing with you (Fast Company)
Attracting students at full price (Inside Higher Ed) Bad for standards?
Public safety versus political rent-seeking (Marginal Revolution)

Some links on teaching and learning

Merit Pay and teacher assessment - details matter. (Freakonomics and Economix) (On that note, Roland Fryer got a "genius" grant. Part of his research shows that merit pay for students also depends on the details.)
Cognition and the McGurk Effect (Marginal Revolution)
Cognition and belief in God (Marginal Revolution)
Belief in God and faith in the free market (Free Exchange) (Not Related to teaching or learning, but on a free association from the previous link.)

Liberal Media Bias

I've blogged about this before, and it seems at first the answer was yes. Is it more complicated? A new Vox post suggests that on average it is 'liberal' but not much moreso on average than the average citizen. Furthermore, it appears (from print media) that the bias is more leftward on social issues, and more rightward on economic issues.

Is Bernanke Giving Us All the Bird?

This stock photo of Bernanke is a bit unsettling, no?

Some Links

Michelle Bachman's solution to high gas prices: another recession?
This always bears repeating. We live in one of the most peaceful times of the modern era.
Get up or pay!
The revenue-neutral carbon tax.
Diaspora bonds? Color me skeptical. Previous attempts to use active policy to sop up more of emigrants' surplus have not been so successful.
Biggest parenting mistakes ever? Mine, I'm sure, are still to come.
News flash: cash transfers dominate in-kind gifts.

Some Links: Porn is good.

So, it at least looks doubtful that porn increases sexual violence; it may reduce it.

A couple of links on migration:

Where is everybody? Some difficulties in migration research and some new data sources (VOX).

Less Mexicans migrating (PeopleMove)?

Is the market crazy? (Freakonomics) I don't think so. I'm not surprised at a decline in stocks with the uncertainty about the debt and, more importantly, about debt politics. Political uncertainty can be an important factor in economic performance, but over the long run superior property rights, contracting, and civil liberty will root out the short run uncertainty wrought by partisanship.

What are the Tea Partiers' interests? (Economix)

Playing by the real rules of Monopoly. (Game Night)

Cocktail Party Economics.

Emission trading begins to go international. (Economist) For any "cap and trade" scheme to be effectively binding, it must be globalized; else I still prefer a tax, for that and other reasons.

Gender bias and agricultural technology. (Economist)

Media - back to coffee houses? (Economist)

Some Random Links

An interesting short piece on the Isreli-Palestinian conflict (Haushofer, et al.)
A shamelessly self-interested link - somebody buy our house!
Is there a great divergence? (Rodrik)
Summary of an interview by Felix Simon with Larry Summers. Sentences to ponder:

The Treasury bond rate, Treasury note rate for ten years is 2.85 percent. Nobody is failing to invest because 2.85 percent is too much. They are failing to invest because there are no customers in their store. They are failing to invest because their factories are sitting empty. They are failing to innovate because they’re not sure how large the market for the product will be.

We don't need a C.E.O. A country is not a business. We need a policy expert. (Economix)

Economics for kids? (Freakonomics)

Banerjee on Poverty. (Economist)

Debt impacts of new policies GWB vs. BHO.

Some links

Increasing taxes a little and funding health reform may do more good (at least in the short run) than cutting spending. Someone remind folks that tax revenues are already at 50 year lows as a percentage of GDP.

A similar (but maybe a bit less firm) conclusion here.

More similar conclusions from Krugman on modern Keynesianism (on VOX not his hackish blog).

A couple of cool statistics links:

Paydays are a killer?

Billion Prices Project

Some institutional links:

Gender bias and agricultural technology

Cursed by resources or institutions?

Why continuing to be a Royals fan (among other things) is good for me.

Exports are overrated?

More Random Links

Can democracy precede (human, and hence economic) development? (VOX)
Just scroll down to the last graph. How long can the "big government" narrative be sold? Government isn't that big; transfers are just high because of the recession and taxes are horrendously low for the same reason, as well as the 2001 & 2003 tax cuts. (Menzie Chinn)
Some "odd"ities from InTrade. (Freakonomics)
"[H]ow many students struggle with elasticity formulas because they struggle to manipulate and understand fractions?" (Worthwhile Canadian Initiative)

A Mixed Bag of Links

HIV/AIDS on the decline: Education, drugs, and activism credited. (Economist)
Do law-abiding gun owners generate positive externalities? (Economix) I do not read this piece as an argument against most proposed restrictions, such as registration per se or waiting periods, or even bans on certain types of weapons.
Taxing pollution: The tax a sensible conservative should favor (Economist)
Tyler Cowen on Academic Publishing (Kosmos)

Some links on immigration and trade (and a couple on statistics)

So, what we can get from this is: (1) immigrants are favorably selected (relative to education levels in their home countries - nothing new); (2) this is not always a bad thing for the home countries in the long run. It does not lead to the conclusion that immigrants should be deliberately cherry picked by some artificial policy mechanism.
Banking in the US is finally catching up with resources already available to Africa.
Finance and trade: A historical perspective. (Vox)
Gambling: chance or skill? (Freakonomics)
Some interesting polling data on perceptions about homosexuality. (Economist/Democracy in America) Makes me think the "gay marriage trick" won't work in 2012 like it did in 2004.
Semi-random link on self-publishing a book. (Freakonomics)

Some Links on International Economics and other Random Stuff.

In factor endowments models of trade, we usually think of the quantity of land as fixed. Dubai tried to disprove this, but their man-made islands are now sinking. Nature seems to have a better way of proving me wrong. (NYTimes)
An interesting take on the trade deficit with China, which, by the way fits with a simple inter-temporal comparative advantage story. (Economist)
Female Migration and Development. (PeopleMove; also here)

Economists behaving badly. (Ezra Klein)
"Page Numbers are for Wussies." (Cheep Talk)

One Possible Take on the NPR Hoo-Hah

One take is that this is the gotcha moment where the right finally proved the liberal bias of NPR. Maybe.

But, as conservative Heather MacDonald points out:

I fail to see the relevance of an NPR employee’s off-air criticism of
the Tea Party to the question of NPR’s federal funding or its liberal
bias. Conservatives can easily prove liberal bias by analyzing the
content of the programming.

I have no doubt that there is a significant over-representation of
democrats and "liberals" among the employees  who work and report for
NPR, but that in and of itself does not imply that they are anything other than
professional and fair in their coverage of the news. In fact, on average, although there is liberal bias in the media overall, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting seems to be among the most scrupulously centrist news organizations out there, according to a study by Tim Groseclose and Jeffrey Milyo (2005, Quarterly Journal of Economics):

Our results show a strong liberal bias: all of the news outlets we
examine, except Fox News’ Special Report and the Washington Times,
received scores to the left of the average member of Congress.
Consistent with claims made by conservative critics, CBS Evening News
and the New York Times received scores far to the left of center. The
most centrist media outlets were PBS NewsHour, CNN’s Newsnight, and
ABC’s Good Morning America; among print outlets, USA Today was closest
to the center. [Emphasis added.]

Furthermore,

Conservatives frequently list NPR as an egregious example of a liberal news outlet. However, by our estimate the outlet hardly differs from the average mainstream news outlet.

PBS NewsHour is a CPB production. So, (1) according to Ms. MacDonald personal political views of the executives shouldn't matter; (2) also according to Ms. MacDonald bias should be proven through an analysis of the content; (3) statistical analysis of the content shows little or no bias by several major public broadcasting programs. What does this mean of Mr. O'Keefe's video? One conclusion might be that it only weakens the case against NPR and CPB as "left-wing liberal media."  In fact, given the widespread (and probably correct) notion that public broadcasting mostly employs bleeding-heart liberal hippies, the fact that NPR's and PBS's content is demonstrably unbiased relative to other media (not to mention lack of influence by corporate advertisers) only strengthens the case for its continued public support.