David Atkins succinctly nails the situation we face: No matter what Obama does, Republicans won’t care and won’t fold…This is what makes the poker analogy so often used to criticize the President’s negotiating tactics such a weak metaphor. Obama is often said to be the worst poker player in history, consistently bluffing then folding. But […]

The other day I looked at number of guns versus number of gun deaths by country, in countries like ours that have pretty good rule of law. The correlation is pretty clear: more guns, more gun deaths. But I was also wondering about correlation within the U.S., by state. I’m pleased to find that Sam […]

When I was eighteen years old, I went down to the government office in Olympia, Washington with my friend Steve (no, not that Steve) and signed as the character witness on his application for a concealed carry permit for his handgun. I was probably stoned at the time; I often was back then. (FYI, I […]

Update: There is a revised and corrected version of the model and spreadsheet here, with discussion. In a recent post I built a model with one rich person and ten poorer people to ask: does redistribution from rich to poor make us all more wealthy? The conclusion was Yes. Jump back there to see a quick rundown […]

Krugman’s leeches analogy today spurs me to comment: If the police department in your town is doing a bad job and the crime rate is high, the obvious solution is to cut funding for the police department! Sounds a lot like bloodletting theory, dontcha think? We’ll just drain off the bad blood! It’s so simple […]

Two articles in The New York Times today got me thinking about the tragedy of the commons. This is not new thinking, but it’s not widespread enough, in my opinion. And, I hope this expresses it in a somewhat new way. One of the articles talks about the ongoing failure of pharmaceutical companies to develop […]

‘It is suicidal for the field to slide into a hard science of choice,’ Coase writes in HBR, ‘ignoring the influences of society, history, culture, and politics on the working of the economy.’ (By ‘choice,’ he means ever more complex versions of price and demand curves.) U Chicago, my daughter’s college, sends me interesting emails […]

Following up on my last post, I actually think that there are two possible explanations for the “Fed Credibility” argument’s wide deployment, both hinted at in Simon’s response to my comment: I think the credibility argument is really about the underlying motives of the policymakers, rather than their abilities. However I also think that argument […]

For once a short post, inspired by Simon Wren’s suggestion that the Fed should allow (encourage) a temporary rise in wage inflation. (The merits of such a policy being obvious to many of us given the current virtues of some extra inflation, and past decades’ wage trends.) I’ve never understood the credibility danger of the […]

Today’s New York Times article on rapid online repricing by holiday retailers depicts a retail world starting to approach the “flash-trading” status of financial markets: Amazon dropped its price on the game, Dance Central 3, to $24.99 on Thanksgiving Day, matching Best Buy’s “doorbuster” special, and went to $15 once Walmart stores offered the game […]