Unlearning Econ: The story goes like this: an Israeli day care centre found that parents were picking up their children too late, so they introduced a small charge of $3 to try and disincentivise lateness. However, instead of discouraging this behaviour, the payment served to legitimise it and buy the parents piece of mind. The […]

Has the Shale Bubble Already Burst? (Igor Alexeev, Naked Capitalism cross posted from Oil Price) “The average depletion rate of wells in the Bakken Formation (the largest tight oil play in the US) is reported to be 69 percent in the first year and 94 percent over the first five years (37 percent and 50 […]

Thank you contributors and readers, it’s true. We are listed at 34th this time, even missing Robert Waldmann and Kenneth Thomas mentions in Paul Krugman’s  New York Times columns this month as rankings were determined in July. Onalytical Indexes publishes their  Top 200 Influential Economics Blogs – Aug 2013 by Andreea Moldovan It’s been several months since […]

DIN. We should print up lapel buttons. I suggested this campaign some time ago: This would: • Transfer relative purchasing power (hence power) from holders of financial assets to holders of real assets — from Wall Street to Main Street — and from (relatively few) creditors to (many more) debtors. • Spur both consumption spending […]

There was a flurry of articles trumpeting an effect of Obamacare on the rise in part time employment. Quite a stretch for some with ‘data’. Here the FRBSF weighs in: What’s Behind the Increase in Part-Time Work?    Rob Valletta and Leila Bengali August 26, 2013 Part-time work spiked during the recent recession and has […]

Washington Post contributor Jamelle Bouie, or @jbouie, posted the following to a thread in Alex Seitz-Wald’s Twitter feed (or whater it’s called) about my hyphenated-names post from earlier today: Holy crap. That post would have been better if it were just “Look at this Jewry Jew Jew.” To which I responded: I don’t buy into […]

One of the really annoying (at least to me) fads among late Baby Boomers and Gen Xers, mainly, I suspect, from the Northeast and the Washington, D.C. area, is the hyphenated-last-name thing for their children.  As in, say, Alex Seitz-Wald, a Millennial blogger at the Washington Post’s The Plum Line, whose post from this morning, […]

No, not that kind of “special.” Though it sure is tempting… Paul Krugman, Scott Sumner (seemingly unlikely bedfellows, but…), and most other mainstream economists want to argue that banks are not special — that there’s no reason for economists to understand and analyze their operations in detail, or incorporate those understandings in their (mental and formal) economic […]

The example presented of a community and willful blindness is concrete enough to be useful for a conversation I believe, and to mean something to readers in general. There is the risk the term ‘willful blindness’ be bandied about and misused as happened in prior years with the term ‘cognitive dissonance’, a term thrown like […]