Paul Krugman demonstrates just how simple models can and should be. He presented a trade model on the New York Times opinion pages. He also apologised for extreme wonkishness, but I don’t think he had to. His aim is to find an example in which Trump’s tariffs on steel cause lower wages (also for steel […]

Low response rates are a problem for pollsters. The worst problem is candidate specific response bias in which supporters of one candidate are more likely to respond than supporters of another. This can make polls worthless. It is interested to the other very hard problem of predicting who will actually vote. I am thinking of […]

Here I go again, commenting on Krugman. But this time on a 5 year old talk on the risk that investors will lose confidence in the solvency of the US Treasury “CURRENCY REGIMES, CAPITAL FLOWS, ANDCRISES”. I think the talk about the risks of excessive budget deficits and unsustainable debt accumulation is much more relevant […]

Paul Krugman has been wondering why stock market indices fell so sharply soon after Trump began trade-war-mongering. (also less wonkily here) He starts by noting that it’s a mugs game to try to explain stock market fluctuations, but then tries all the same. The puzzle is that according to the very standard Heckscher Ohlin Samuelson […]

This essay is excellent. Just click the link. Kai Stinchcombe argues “blockchain is a … technology, not a metaphor” here’s what blockchain-the-technology is: “Let’s create a very long sequence of small files — each one containing a hash of the previous file, some new data, and the answer to a difficult math problem — and divide up some money […]

Paul Krugman is characteristically and very admirably willing to discuss in this pdf what he got wrong. In particular, he now thinks that in the 1990s he underestimated the medium costs to the USA of globalization. This is especially striking, because his debate with Bill Clinton et al on this topic was uh rather heated. […]

Back when he was a conservative (and didn’t just play one on TV) David Brooks specialized in the ecological inference fallacy. He tried to argue that the Democratic party was the elite party, because Democratic “blue” states are wealthier than red states. He wrote as if all people in blue states were upper middle class […]

First I stress the great effort I put into avoiding all Lamb puns in the title. Second, I think the discussion of his recent extremely narrow voctory makes the discussion of the campaign seem almost sane. Before their humiliating loss, Republican operatives insisted that voters were coming around to support their tax cut bill. In […]

It is unfair for me to pick on Paul Kane writing in the Washington Post, but he does seem to me to be a clear example of political reporters who interview operatives and quote them and do not look at relevant publicly available data. The main point of the article is that Republicans are in […]

Twenty years ago, Paul Krugman warned that the liquidity trap was not just an issue in the economic history of the 30s. He noted there was every sign that Japan was in the liquidity trap in the 90s, then argued that a liquidity trap was theoretically possible. I guess one lesson is that economists even […]