Any one knowledgeable?…leave a comment on winners and losers. Deal book today describes rather ho hum changes in capital requirements for banks with a positive spin: FED’S DIET PLAN FOR BANKS The Federal Reserve said on Monday that it planned to increase the pressure on large financial firms to slim down, DealBook’s Peter Eavis writes. […]

Via Naked Capitalism: Ballooning Finance: How Financial Innovation Produces Overgrowth and Busts Yves here. It’s a welcome surprise to see economists devise a model that delivers generally sensible results. Here, three economists looked at how financial innovation leads to an bloated financial sector as well as greatly increasing the risk of meltdown. One quibble is […]

Barkley Rosser at Econospeak writes an op-ed on the Washington Post’s reporting: Dana Milbank Joins Parade Of WaPo Hysterics Over Social Security And Medicare Dean Baker has posted on this more completely and effectively than I shall do here (and his url is so long on this one, I shall not link directly, sorry), but […]

Sandwichman at Econospeak writes more on the issue of ‘labor’: Lump of Labor Day Special: Advanced (Elementary) Concepts in Mathematics “…if there be but a certain proportion of work to be done; and that the same be already done by the not-Beggars; then to employ the Beggars about it, will but transfer the want from […]

Lifted from open thread Aug. 31, 2014 by Sandwichman. My latest on the lump of labor fallacy takes the story back to the 17th century and John Graunt’s Observations on the Bills of Mortality. Graunt speculated about a certain PROPORTION of work to be done. The fallacy claim alleges the assumption of a fixed QUANTITY […]

Peter Dorman at Econospeak describes a common example of thought experiments on markets and externalities, and concludes with “More complex considerations that take into account dynamics, interaction effects and the like never intrude.  What you end up with is an ideological truncation of economics, and, as the Great Airplane Debate illustrates, it is largely ideology […]