Economics 
What is (and isn't) funny about economics
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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 [...]
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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 [...]
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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 [...]
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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 [...]
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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 [...]
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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 [...]
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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 [...]
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A must-read for hippies
Posted 8/31/09
Hippies (and everyone else) should read Elizabeth Kolbert’s “Green like me” in the New Yorker. The author of a great book on climate change called Field Notes from a Catastrophe, Kolbert reviews the book No Impact Man by Colin Beavan (in which he spends a year trying to “go green”, e.g., by doing without toilet [...]
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Fuchs on health care, the public option, and adverse selection
Posted 8/21/09
A great overview of the issues, as noted by Richard Thaler.
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Remembering the Google IPO
Posted 8/20/09
A neat post about the 5th anniversary of Google’s IPO (Initial Public Offering), which used an auction mechanism to sell shares. The original price of $85 seemed outrageous at the time… but the stock is now selling for $445. A good reminder of the efficient market hypothesis! PS. Another auction story, this one a bit [...]
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