Is There An Objective Reality? Yes. So this is the ontological question: is supposed apparently “objective” reality really real? I come at this as someone who in the past questioned this. I had my period of post-modernist questioning of objective reality. This culminated in a paper, which I presented as a major address to receive […]
2019 has been a strange year. I hope for a better 2020 with a Happy Landing later in the year. In the spirit of Christmas; Be Safe, Enjoy Family, Be Thankful for Life, Give Freely to Others, Eat Hearty and Drink some good Beer, Wine, or Liquor of your choice, and Relax. The appropriate saying […]
Does Menzie Chinn Or Tyler Cowen Replace Mark Thoma? The retirement of Mark Thoma, whose Economist’s View has been praised on his retirement with having transformed the econoblogosphere back in the mid- noughties by linking regularly, daily in his heyday, to other blogs, including this one. Thanks to him when the big crash happened, there […]
Trump Brags About Record Defense Spending Niv Elis covers the latest in the Trump fiscal fiasco: President Trump on Friday signed two spending packages totaling $1.4 trillion, averting a government shutdown at midnight. The bills included all 12 annual appropriations bills for the 2020 fiscal year that started Oct. 1. They also included a slew of […]
The Afghanistan War (posted by run75441) The Washington Post has over the last 7 days published a detailed account based on many secret documents they have spent years obtaining to provide an accurate account of what has happened during what is now the longest war the US has been engaged in. It is an impressive […]
Being an economist can be frustrating. Most people do not understand how markets work, and economists spend a good deal of time arguing against bad policy ideas that appeal to non-economists, and for good ideas that do not appeal to common-sense. This can sometimes feel like pushing rocks uphill. Plus it can lead people to […]
Amazing . . . President Trump’s Letter to the Speaker of the House Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi The first clue that much of the six pages of this letter was not written by Mr. Trump is the salutation; “Dear Madam Speaker.” Then it goes through a series of rants. You can catch a version on Politico […]
“I didn’t find half a dozen people,” John Richards (96) said on his website about the past in his search for associates to join him. Mr. Richards started a society after seeing the “same mistakes over and over again” in the usage of the Apostrophe. He had hoped he would find half a dozen people […]
I first met Volcker when I was a junior international economist in Washington in the late 1960s. He was the Treasury Under Secretary for International Economics. I was going to a luncheon at the National Press Club for the Indian Finance Minister. As I got on the elevator, Paul Volcker and John Kenneth Galbraith — […]
by Eric Kramer The Case for Carbon Taxes, Part II: Political Sustainability In a prior post, I argued that carbon taxes are not vulnerable to political subversion by hostile courts and regulators, and that this is an important advantage of carbon taxes over traditional regulation based on mandates, and also an advantage over subsidies. Once […]