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 […]
Is the US economy booming? April 2018 update Back in January, I asked if the economy was “booming.” There’s no official definition, but based on my recollection of the two periods I have lived through that felt like booms, the1960s and late 1990s, the two times in my life that the feel of an economic […]
(Dan here…lifted from Robert’s Stochastic Thoughts) Thoughts on Capehart on Kagan I ì’m reading the Washington Post and note one very outstanding op-ed by Catharine Rampell which you should just read. She links to excellent summaries of social science research and notes that Republicans don’t listen to experts and aren’t reality based.But I want to write about […]
February 2018 JOLTS report: positive trend revised away Last month I wrote that the January JOLTS report reflected very positive trends. Today they got revised away. As a refresher, unlike the jobs report, which tabulates the net gain or loss of hiring over firing, the JOLTS report breaks the labor market down into openings, hirings, […]
A thought for Sunday: The Abyss always looks back, Presidential polling edition A point I have made about economic forecasting a number of times is that one can be an excellent forecaster, so long as one is a bug on the wall. Once a significant number of people begin to follow *and act upon* the […]
A Teachable Moment: The Importance of Meta-Learning Today’s New York Times has a fine article by Manil Suri about math education and the development of reasoning skills. Its concluding point is that, while the general contribution of the first to the second is weaker than you might think, math instruction can be improved by bringing the math-reasoning […]
This particular Sears opened in 1938 with over 100,000 people visiting it during its 1st day. The store was located at the intersection of Irving Park Road, Cicero Avenue, and Milwaukee Avenue known as Six Corners and situated on the edge of the Portage Park Community. Hillman’s grocery was located in the basement. Hillmans later […]
(Dan here…I have highlighted NDd’s conclusion. This is a long post but worth thinking about…) So in conclusion, while I have no doubt that the “monopsony” argument is measuring something real, I am more and more inclined to believe that raising wages is simply becoming an ideological taboo among businesses, a higher priority than maximizing […]
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 […]
In a low inflation world firms tend to raise prices once a year — typically in the first quarter or the first quarter of their fiscal year. Consequently, over half of the annual increase in the not seasonally adjusted core CPI occurs in the first quarter and doubling the first quarter increase gives an amazingly […]