Robert Waldmann Arnold Kling states a widely held view succinctly I see elite Democrats as exploiting “the poor” in order to pursue their own drive for power. People who genuinely care about the poor work with the poor and give their own money to the poor. Liberals mostly just pose about caring for the poor […]
Robert Waldmann My effort immediately below to explain some general equilibrium theory in English didn’t work out so well. Here I will attempt to give simple examples which show how rational individual choice and/or trade between rational consenting adults can make everyone worse off. Models will all involve strange fruit trees, that is assets which […]
Robert Waldmann I’m not kidding. Someone in some thread said that he or she thought it would be great if I could give a simple intuitive explanation of Geanakoplos and Polemarchakis (1985). Also I would get an interesting perspective on the crisis if I could fly to the moon. I will try after the jump. […]
Robert Waldmann I am still trying to understand why smart economists have made extremely silly arguments against the stimulus. I am thinking of the dark ages of macroeconomics and the Treasury View. I think an analogy is useful. It is related to the original dark ages and modern medical practice. The analogy is not for […]
Robert Waldmann Arnold Kling (via Matt Yglesias) argues that economists agree more about microeconomics than about macroeconomics. My take on this is that the consensus of economists is likely to be more reliable on microeconomic issues than it is on macroeconomic issues. In my view, fundamental macroeconomic issues are unsettled. It makes sense to have […]
Robert Waldmann The Geithner plan has been announced and the Dow has dropped 381.99 so far today Reminds me of this by Daniel Drezner [O]ne could forgive Geithner right now if his head swelled just a little bit. The Dow Jones Industrial Average shot up five hundred points on Friday as word of his appointment […]
Robert Waldmann Mashall wrote New York Times columnist Paul Krugman came out blasting yesterday, all but calling the president a postpartisan wimp. Obama’s stimulus plan, he said, is too small to plug the hole in our economy created by faltering private demand. And he chided the president for allowing a bipartisan group of Senate moderates […]
Robert Waldmann I have a proposal for targetted temporary spending which will have a huge immense disproportionate social benefit. It is not, shall we say, very controversial as it comes under the NIH budget — the one the house and senate are competing to pump up most. On the other hand, the Senate bill calls […]
I hear from a friend that some of my posts have not been warmly welcomed by economists with PhDs from the economics department of the University of Minnesota. I thought I would share more of my impressions of economic research that has been done over there after the jump For one thing, there is this […]
I am flattered that the economic of contempt guy* wrote me a long e-mail about my last CDS post. The e-mail is after the jump. my comments on his comments in [brackets] I am flattered by the attention. Really, I stress, I only recently learned what a CDS is. I wanted to respond to your […]