rdan Dean Baker suggests an intriguing innovation to competition in healthcare: While health care may at first blush not seem suitable for international trade, since the delivery is place specific, on closer inspection there are ways that the United States could benefit from the more efficient health care systems of other countries. The most obvious […]
by Gavin Kennedy(cross posted from Adam Smith’s Lost Legacy) Identify the Invisible Hand! Alex Tabarrok writes on the Nobel Prize for Oliver Williamson in an article on the Marginal Revolution Blog “Oliver Williamson and the pin factory”, which is fine but it contains the following paragraph: “Transaction cost economics is all about applying these ideas […]
Robert Waldmann has definitely not been spending enough time in bars. Nation food correspondent Calvin Trillin met a guy in a bar who explained why the financial system collapsed.I nominate some guy in a bar for the Nobel memorial prize in economics. The explanation ? “The financial system nearly collapsed,” he said, “because smart guys […]
Robert Waldmann Doug Elmendorf says that the costs of cap and trade will be miniscule and does not try to estimate the benefits. Juliet Eilperin of the Washington Post demonstrates that she is the second most innumerate person on the planat, the most innumerate is the** guy who wrote the headline “Cap-and-Trade Would Slow Economy, […]
by cactus I live in a city of with less than a quarter million people. (The greater metropolitan area is larger, of course – there are well over half a million people in the surrounding area.) Since we moved here a year and change ago, its hard to avoid noticing that in this city, politics […]
by Linda Beale A Year and Counting: re-regulation of Wall Street On Monday night, I participated in a symposium on the Financial Crisis: One Year Later, sponsored by the Center for the Study of Citizenship and others. With me were Larry Ingrassia, Business Editor of the New York Times, and Chip Dickson, CFO of W2Freedom, […]
by Bruce Webb Key Senate committee passes health care plan The Senate Finance Committee passed a long-awaited $829 billion health care bill Tuesday by a 14-9 vote. Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, was the lone committee member to cross party lines, breaking with other Republicans to vote for the measure. All the committee’s Democrats supported the […]
rdanChild Labor Through the Strange Filter of Orthodox Economics Peter Dorman at Econospeak notes that our official line concerning child labor in international trade has little research to back it up, and tends to always say ‘don’t mess with trade’: There is much to endorse in the innards of the argument made by Matthias Doepke […]
by reader ilsm The Tanker Saga, Continued, New York Times Oct 8 2009: Trying to recover from past mistakes, the Pentagon has initiated a third competition for a new Air Force midair refueling tanker. After two bungled attempts, defense officials, contractors and Congress really need to get it right this time. [snip] Another unresolved competition […]