Andrew Gelman points to our confusions regarding merit in our social perceptions of winners and losers. I might make a list of naughty and nice sayings for another post. Tyler Cowen pointed to an article by business-school professor Luigi Zingales about meritocracy. I’d expect a b-school prof to support the idea of meritocracy, and Zingales […]
Not a very long time, even if there were full and complete co-operation. Or, as LBJ said, Source (cross-posted from Skippy, the Bush Kangaroo)
I agree with Diamond and Saez that the top marginal income tax rate should be slightly over 70%, but I don’t agree with what I take their reasoning to be. My argument after the jump. They argue that the tax rate should be chosen to maximize taxes collected from the super rich. the argument that […]
Reader Jazzbumpa suggests taking a look at Yves Smith’s Journey into a Libertarian Future series as part of Mike’s thought experiment on the subject here. A very good read. He also offers one of his own posts on the matter at Retirement Blues Brute economics of slavery. And opines at the end of his e-mail […]
Nancy Folbre is an economics professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Her post in the NYT Economix begins: The Occupy Wall Street movement, displaced from some key geographic locations, now enjoys a small but significant encampment among economists. Concerns about the impact of growing economic inequality fit neatly into a larger critique of mainstream […]
Via Reuters comes David Cay Johnston’s musing on Closing Wall Street’s casino A superb example of a sound rule in law and economics that needs reviving, because it can halt the rampant speculation in derivatives, is the ancient legal principle that gambling debts are not enforceable through court action. Find the best betting sites at […]
byMike Kimel Barry Ritholtz points us to a Bloomberg article showing, once again, that when it came to measures to prop up the economy in 2008, some animals are more equal than others: Paulson explained that under this scenario, the common stock of the two government-sponsored enterprises, or GSEs, would be effectively wiped out. So […]
byMike Kimel [edited to make authorship clearer] Libertarians come in many flavors, but I think most of them would agree that in an ideal world, the government would be very small and have limited powers – essentially, the government would control national defense and perhaps adjudicate over property rights disputes (i.e., maintain police and/or the […]
by Mike Kimel This one comes via Yves Smith. It seems some companies, er, “salvage” moldy and otherwise defective food, repackage it, and sell it.
(Elizabeth Warren has hired a campaign manager and has thousands of volunteers signing up for her campaign for the Senate seat in MA that Senator Scott Brown currently occupies. He has a lot of work to do for this election.) Guess who wrote this op-ed?? The moment you threaten to strip politicians of their legal […]