Economics 
What is (and isn't) funny about economics
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Stand-Up Economics: The Micro Textbook
Posted 8/19/09
To coincide with the release of The Cartoon Introduction to Economics, I’m working on updates of a (free!) companion micro textbook. Here are the latest versions of the textbook: basic and with calculus.
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Greg Mankiw on carbon
Posted 8/19/09
Read it here. Also interesting is Steven Landsburg’s response here.
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Adverse selection and unemployment insurance: Bad news
Posted 8/19/09
The NY Times reports the (economically) obvious: there’s no private market for unemployment insurance. The problem, of course, is adverse selection: Individuals know much more than insurers about their risk of being laid off, and only those at high risk will seek coverage. PS. A terrific read here is Martin Feldstein’s presidential address to the [...]
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The $500,000 hot dog
Posted 8/19/09
How much would you pay to have the exclusive license to sell hot dogs outside the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NY City? Slate reports that the city auctions off the rights… for almost half a million dollars per year!
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My redesigned website… and my 1/2-LTE in The Economist
Posted 8/06/09
Just in time for my Letter to the Editor that was half-published in The Economist (click “more” to see the full LTE), I’ve got a newly redesigned website, courtesy of Outward Focus Design. I hope you like it, and please email me if you find any problems! [more]
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Cake-cutting in the NFL
Posted 7/28/09
Here’s a neat article about using auctions in NFL overtime.
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Climate Update
Posted 6/16/09
NPR explains cap-and-trade with a fun story about limiting use of the word “dude”. Alan Durning of Sightline explains why he (mostly) loves Waxman-Markey. The Breakthrough Institute folks explain why they don’t. The U.S. has restarted a pilot project for CCS (carbon capture and sequestration). And House speaker Nancy Pelosi comes back from China with [...]
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Elasticities and Monopoly Pricing
Posted 6/16/09
David Pogue talks about what he calls the App Store Effect: The App Store Effect says this: if you cut a software program’s price in half, you sell far more than twice as many copies. If you cut it to one-tenth, you sell far more than 10 times as many. And so on. In other [...]
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Health Care Update
Posted 6/16/09
Big debate about having a “public option“, and bad news from a Congressional Budget Office review of health care proposals.
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More depressing articles on the budget
Posted 6/11/09
The federal government is trying to bring back budget rules that embody some sort of common sense: Mr. Obama announced he was sending legislation to Congress to restore the 1990s-era “pay as you go” law, known as Paygo. The law, in effect from 1990 to 2002, required that tax cuts or new entitlement spending — [...]
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