Relevant and even prescient commentary on news, politics and the economy.

A Bleg

Good evening.  Or a fine morning to you, whatever the case may be.   I am working on a project in my spare time.  Some of the data I am collecting might make for good blog posts. Anyway, there are a few things whose trajectory I’d like to measure historically.  I have come up ideas […]

A Non-Distortionary Tax

Dead people aren’t allowed to drive.  They aren’t allowed to vote.  They aren’t allowed to testify in court, acquire weaponry, check out books from the library or acquire a pilot’s license.  This makes sense.  After all, dead people don’t have a functioning brain.  As a result, we wouldn’t want them driving or voting or wandering […]

Trumponomics

Trump’s America First economic strategy looks a lot like the import substitution economic development strategy that was so popular several decades ago—notably in Latin America and South Asia..  But it only had limited success, especially compared to the export led growth strategy followed in East Asia.  Import substitution tended to produce fragmented, inefficient and low […]

Meanwhile this is still going on during the week….

From Diane Ravitch’s blog: While we’re consumed 24/7 with the Trump/Russia psychodrama, Republicans are quietly, under the cover of darkness and diversion, introducing these new bills in the House: HR 610 Vouchers for Public Education — (The bill also repeals basic nutrition standards for the national school lunch and breakfast programs) HR 899 Terminate the […]

Education and Externalities

Some years ago I read this NBER working paper. (Note – a couple years later a slightly modified version appeared in the American Economic Journal but I will quote from the earlier, non-paywalled version since it is available to everyone.) Here’s the issue, in a nutshell: In this paper, we use administrative data from the […]