Economics 
What is (and isn't) funny about economics
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Time to explore new directions for U.S. climate policy
Posted 6/13/10
The West Coast is in perfect position to play a leading role, hence the carbonWA.org ballot measure campaign I’m part of! Details in the rest of the post and/or in this memo on carbon pricing in Washington State; see also [More...]
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Krugman on climate change
Posted 4/07/10
Paul Krugman has a climate change article coming out in the NYT magazine this weekend. Mostly I think this is an excellent summary, but I do have a few comments. In reverse order through the article: So what I end up with is basically Martin Weitzman’s argument: it’s the nonnegligible probability of utter disaster that [...]
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A response to Bryan Caplan
Posted 1/11/10
Bryan Caplan of George Mason University has written a thoughtful review of my Cartoon Introduction to Economics, so I want to offer a response, starting (for no really good reason) at the bottom of his review and proceeding to the top. We first find Caplan arguing that my co-author Grady Klein and I “shouldn’t have [...]
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My new paper with Elaina Rose on economics education
Posted 12/11/09
Update Dec 17 2011: The paper was eventually published in the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization (79: 318-327, 2011) and featured in the NY Times (“The dismal education”, Dec 18 2011). Elaina Rose and I have a new working paper out: Why are economics students more selfish than the rest? The abstract: A substantial [...]
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On “The Story of Cap and Trade”
Posted 12/05/09
There’s a new video out that criticizes cap-and-trade. Overall, I’d give it a “C”. Here’s why: The good The dangers of promising something for nothing. Many supporters of the current cap-and-trade legislation work hard to avoid the fundamental truth about cap-and-trade, namely that—like a carbon tax—it reduces pollution by making polluting expensive. As a result, [...]
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Good thing my PhD’s not from Harvard!
Posted 11/09/09
Dick Armey (former House majority leader and himself an econ PhD) in an NYT Magazine article by Michael Sokolove: He spent the first part of his working life as a professor, rising to chairman of the economics department at North Texas State University. “I’m an economist and, I don’t mind telling you, a damn good [...]
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My hilarious global warming exchange with Ruffin and Gregory
Posted 11/06/09
In November 2000 I received a complimentary copy of a new microeconomics textbook by two professors at the University of Houston. The book’s treatment of global warming was so amazing that I picked up some HTML (thanks Barb!!!) and brought their text onto the web, along with an email exchange with the authors, emails from [...]
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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 [...]
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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 [...]
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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 [...]
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