Can Nudging Become A New Road To Serfdom? Last weekend I attended a conference at NYU Law School on “Behavioral Economics and the New Paternalism, organized by Austrian economist Mario Rizzo and classical liberal law professor Richard Epstein. It included economists, lawyers, philosophers, and a couple of psychologists. While there was a range of views […]
Unresolved Issues In Happiness Economics From The Conference Honoring The Retirement Of The Field’s Founder That would be Richard A. Easterlin, age 92, retiring this spring from the U. of Southern California after being there since 1981, following an earlier stint at U. of Penn, where he got his PhD under Simon Kuznets. Kuznets in […]
A Half Century Ago Today A half century ago today Martin Luther King, Jr. was shot dead in Memphis, Tennessee. This remains one of the saddest events in our history. This will not be a long post other than remembering this event that ended the life of this great man. I have only two observations. […]
This Is Tax Simplification? I happen to support tax simplification that does not increase regressivity of the tax system, and I recognize that there are a few parts of the Trump tax change that do that. But mostly it massively increases regressivity, along with massively increasing the budget deficit at a time when we are […]
The Final End Of The As-Is/Red Line Agreement In London yesterday visiting Saudi Crown Prince, Mohammed bin Salman (MbS) allowed the signing of a set of trade memoranda with various British companies, including buying Typhoon aircraft, and many other things, 18 such deals, although some sources say only 14, total value maybe about $90 billion, […]
Basil Moore dies I have just learned that prominent Post Keynesian economist, Basil Moore, died yesterday. I do not know of what or how old he was, although he retired over a decade ago. He is best known as the author of Horizontalists and Vericalists, in which he strongly argued for the endogeneity of money. In more recent […]
Eastern Economic Association Conference So, I returned late last night from Boston where I presented three papers at the 44th Eastern Economic Association conference. Only about 70% of those preregistered made it due to weather, with airport and train station both closed on Friday, first full day of conference. One of those who did not […]
Saudi Crown Prince Tortures Fellow Princes A new report by Hugh Miles at Middle East Monitor, Is the “Saudi Elite Cannibalizing Itself?” by Juan Cole, reports the recent purge of supposedly corrupt princes and high officials was (and continues to be) much more horrendous than previously reported, which I fear does not surprise me. Apparently […]
The WaPo Gang Going After The Usual Suspects On the Budget Falls On Its Face Factually All right, all right, that is not completely fair. Yes, they dump all over Trump and the GOP-run Congress for their massive tax cut directed at the rich, as well as the hypocrisy of the Republicans in so smoothly […]
Drastically Changing the Rules On Infrastructure Spending Most observers have figured out that the Trump infrastructure spending plan seems to be weirdly lopsided in an unrealistic way, with $200 billion in federal spending somehow supposed to inspire a total of $1.5 trillion in spending by state and local sources along with private ones. What has […]