Economics 
What is (and isn't) funny about economics
-
Tragedy of the Commons R.I.P.? Not quite.
Posted 10/24/09
Congratulating Elinor Ostrom for winning the Nobel Prize is terrific, but please don’t get carried away like Jay Walljasper, who writes Tragedy of the Commons, R.I.P.
It is one thing to say that the Tragedy of the Commons is sometimes solved by community-based management or other bottom-up processes, but it is quite another thing to imply [...][more]
-
I agree with George Will!
Posted 10/22/09
Not about everything, of course, but we do both agree that mandatory recycling laws are mostly pointless (so much for my chances of ever being elected to public office!) and believe it or not we even have some common ground on climate change, and I don’t just mean that we both support replacing payroll taxes [...]
[more]
-
A bit more on Superfreakonomics
Posted 10/20/09
We’ve all spent more than enough time on this, but since my previous posts are getting some play (e.g., from Greg Mankiw) I’m going to take the time to write up a few more (concluding?) thoughts:
First: In an earlier post I wrote that “since Steven Levitt doesn’t do any research on climate economics my hunch [...][more]
-
More Superfreakonomics: emails from Steven Levitt
Posted 10/18/09
[Update Oct 19: My (concluding?) thoughts here.]
This may not be terribly interesting, but here is an email correspondence I had with Steven Levitt this morning:
From: Yoram Bauman
To: Steven Levitt
Hi Steve: This email is a hard one for me to write because it may void your kind offer to mention my forthcoming cartoon book on your [...][more]
-
Climate change in Superfreakonomics
Posted 10/18/09
Update Oct 18 11:07am PST: My email exchange with Steven Levitt is here.
Update Oct 19: My (concluding?) thoughts here.
Joe Romm at climateprogress.org posts a PDF of the climate change chapter in the forthcoming book Superfreakonomics by economist Steven Levitt and journalist Stephen Dubner, and in my opinion the chapter is misleading and incredibly disappointing. [...][more]
-
An open letter to Austan Goolsbee (Oct 8 2009)
Posted 10/07/09
Dear Austan: You might think that it was quite a shock for me–”the world’s first and only stand-up economist“–to find a Wall Street Journal blog with the headline “Austan Goolsbee, stand-up economist“.
But in fact I was not shocked, or even surprised. You and your colleagues in the Obama administration have been quite active in redrawing [...][more]
-
Carbon cap: Be careful what you wish for
Posted 10/07/09
Much of the discussion in the environmental community about the climate strategy known as “cap-and-trade” centers on the fact that this strategy sets a hard cap, a maximum level of carbon emissions. Seemingly forgotten is the flip side of the coin: a hard cap also effectively sets a minimum level of carbon emissions. As with [...]
[more]
-
The anthropology of peak oil
Posted 9/18/09
Ari Rubenstein has a hilarious (and thought-provoking) take on participants in the Peak Oil debate, with a “spectrum… from total denial…”
Abiotic Oilers: Related to creation scientists, these folks believe that oil is not a “fossil fuel” but is generated deep in the earth by mysterious geological processes. No really. There’s plenty of oil, we just [...]
[more]
-
Economics sit-com
Posted 9/13/09
In early 2009 a fellow named Sultan organized a contest for a TV show about economists. (Here were the rules, here were the entries, and here was the voting.) My favorite submission, by Hubert Turvy:
William is an economics professor at a small university in Pennsylvania. He specializes in taxation, but has been having trouble getting [...]
[more]
-
Interesting articles
Posted 9/09/09
West Coast fishermen embark on new wave of fishing, including discussion of ITQs.
Chicha! (It’s a traditional Latin American beer—I had it in Ecuador—where the fermentation process is kicked off by chewing corn and then spitting it out to ferment :)
Summer of Work Exposes Medical Students to System’s Ills, a thought-provoking article in the [...][more]
