Results for “kevin hassett” 20 found
Kevin Hassett to step down as CEA chair
Here are various links, Kevin we shall miss ye…it’s not your grandpa’s Trump administration anymore…
Kevin Hassett has been nominated to chair the Council of Economic Advisers
A very good pick, and I will remind you once again it is “Advisers” rather than “Advisors.”
Here are previous MR entries on Kevin Hassett.
Kevin Hassett on whether NBA refs are crooked
In case you don’t know, Kevin is an economist at AEI. Here is where things stand:
Hassett found no smoking gun.
But he did find some weird stuff in elimination games, when calls seemed to favor extending the series more than in other games.
He also found that home court advantage was much more important in the playoffs than in the regular season, which is a bit odd.
Both
findings are consistent with what you’d find if you wanted to have as
many money-making playoff games as possible. Basically, if every series
ended in a sweep, there’d by very little opportunity to make money.
However, if every series gets to Game 7 — which happens when home
teams win every game — the teams and the League have not only three
more chances to make money, but the three most exciting games of the
series.
Here is further explanation. Here is the Hassett piece. Note that fouls called on a team are often a measure of how tired that team is or how sloppy it is on defense. So if teams play better with their back to the wall, at home, or if stamina matters more toward the end of the year, these correlations could potentially arise through natural means.
Monday assorted links
Saturday assorted links
1. “Jutras has been working on the trifecta for a decade, since his pumpkin win.” (who’s complacent!?) And did Iranian ballistic missiles violate the nuclear deal?
2. This is not Arthur Laffer’s napkin. And “Five countries have higher tax rates than the peak of the Laffer curve.”
4. Laibach plays North Korea. And here is Laibach singing “Across the Universe.”
5. Wiblin and Beckstead podcast on how to give away billions.
6. Profile of Kevin Hassett in his new job.
7. “The fish in aquariums is a sort of entertaining bait to catch the attention of travelers for the hidden cameras to scan their faces and irises.” File under The Airport that is Dubai.
Friday assorted links
1. What makes people dislike their doctors.
2. Kevin Hassett is now confirmed, and Richard Burkhauser is named as the third CEA member (WSJ), Tomas Philipson is the other.
4. New Hampshire was the highest earning state in 2016.
5. The new economy of excrement.
6. Stephon Marbury in China watch. And training a pitcher to throw a baseball at 95 mph (recommended).
CEA update, Tomas Philipson to join
President Donald Trump named Tomas Philipson, an economist at the University of Chicago who has specialized in health-care policy, to the three-member Council of Economic Advisers on Monday.
Mr. Philipson briefly served as an adviser to the Trump transition team last fall on health-care matters and was a senior economic adviser to the head of the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services during the George W. Bush administration. Mr. Philipson is the co-founder of Precision Health Economics, a consultancy. He is professor of public policy at the University of Chicago’s Harris School of Public Policy and a director of the Health Economics Program at the university’s Becker Friedman Institute for economic research.
Mr. Trump’s nominee to lead the CEA, Kevin Hassett, hasn’t been confirmed by the Senate. His nomination cleared the Senate Banking Committee with only one lawmaker, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.), voting against him in June.
The two other members of the CEA aren’t subject to Senate confirmation and typically serve for around two years. Mr. Trump hasn’t announced the third member of the council, which has advised presidents for over seven decades on the economic impact of their policies.
That is from the WSJ.
Sunday assorted links
1. The weird economics of IKEA.
2. Sweden rethinks immigration (NYT).
3. Jerome Tuccille has passed away (NYT). And Russell Hardin has passed away.
4. Voxsplainer on Kevin Hassett.
5. Gus Lubin on the complacent class, strivers, and Millennials.
6. “The floppy, lethargic Gudetama, rendered as squeezable as possible.“
The show so far, a continuing series
The big news was that China actually started to apply real pressure to North Korea, namely ceasing to buy their coal for the rest of the year. That may prove a phantom or reversed piece of news, but still it is real progress of some kind, if only in expected value terms. Did Trump’s antics and also his courting of Abe have anything to do with this? We don’t know. Was Obama’s THAAD missile deployment to South Korea a factor? Probably. I say score one for them both. Keep in mind that is probably the world’s #1 foreign policy problem, and otherwise progress has been hard to come by. Their KL airport assassination also may end up as a relevant PR disaster, costing them further foreign support.
Closer to home, outright Obamacare repeal seems increasingly unlikely. Since I never favored Obamacare, you might think I am unhappy, but as I see it they were likely to replace with something unworkable and worse. So this is, if not good news outright, at least the opposite of bad news. Whether through brilliance or incompetence, Trump simply isn’t leading on this issue and so major changes won’t get done, maybe not even minor changes.
Republicans in state governments are running away from fiscal conservatism rather rapidly. The Michigan legislature turned down a tax cut and there was a significant revolt in Kansas. That was an under-reported story, namely a reversal of Tea Party influence on Republican-controlled state governments.
The Border Tax plan appears to be dead or on life support. Flynn is gone and replaced by the apparently excellent McMaster. There is talk (fact?) again of Kevin Hassett as CEA chair — a great idea — and Russia seems increasingly disillusioned with our president, also a nicer place to be.
The new Executive Order on regulation has some upside deregulatory potential. Whether or not you favor a federal role in the matter, I thought it was a good sign to see Betsy DeVos sticking up for transgender rights.
Proposed policies on trade and immigration, as well as rhetoric toward the press, remain awful, plus various “background problems” continue, but overall I thought this was a very good week for Trump, with Flynn out to pasture and the North Korea news far outweighing the rest.
Thursday assorted links
1. Might David Gelernter be Trump’s science advisor? (Funny headline, by the way) And Scott Alexander on Trump’s possible medical picks. And Kevin Hassett is the new CEA rumor.
2. Everything you always wanted to know about SIP latency arbitrage…
3. Further critique of the WTO fallback option.
4. Do we like entertainment better when we make fewer choices?
5. Theories about zebras, good and bad (the theories that is, not the zebras).
6. Maybe it should have been “cling to their guns *or* religion…”
7. One of the more intellectual accounts of what “Alt Right” is about, and with relation to sex and gender as well.
Assorted links
1. Scott Winship reviews Piketty. And Kevin Hassett on Piketty.
2. Why should there be deflation in Sweden?
3. Why is the singing of the national anthem so much better for hockey?
4. Liberalism unrelinquished, a project headed by Daniel Klein to reclaim the use of this word. They are looking for signers.
Sentences to ponder
In 1902, European nations responded to a Venezuelan government debt default with military force. German, Italian and British gunboats blockaded ports, seized customs houses and bombarded a Venezuelan fort. Venezuela caved, agreeing to restructure and pay its debts.
These days, when European leaders see Greece and Ireland on the brink of default, they don't send gunboats–they send money.
That's from Kevin Hassett.
The economics of Halloween
A reform proposal from Kevin Hassett: "So let’s do something to reform Halloween. The first step would be for Halloween donors to give kids money instead of candy. Kids could then go to the supermarket the next day and binge on the candies they really like. That solution would get an A-plus in economics."
Linked here. But alas, in-kind transfers are often more efficient than cash gifts, and that holds for public policy as well. (Imagine giving "money to buy kidney dialysis," instead of "kidney dialysis," and see how many people fake kidney disease.) The candy transfer insures that a) mostly young kids do the asking, and b) at some point everyone just stops and goes home. I’ve long wanted to know how much movie attendance rises on Halloween evening, given that the real cost of going is suddenly and temporarily much lower.
Addendum: Here is a new paper on cash vs. in-kind transfers.
Will any future book series approach the success of Harry Potter?
I’d long wanted to offer my thoughts on this topic, so when Today’s Machining World approached me, I thought they were an ideal outlet. I wrote:
Absolutely. Most of all, the Harry Potter series is a social phenomenon. It’s not mainly about the books. It’s about kids – and often adults – sharing a common reading experience. We crave this kind of social connection – that’s what Oprah’s Book Club is about too. We like to look forward to the same books, read them at the same time, and talk about them afterwards. If you took these same kids, put them on a desert island, and just gave them copies of Harry Potter, with no further information or explanation, most of them wouldn’t be so impressed.
With the current Potter series now over, we are looking for something else to latch on to. We may not find it right away, but when we do, the world will be wealthier and have more readers. Some other book series will trump the popularity of Harry Potter – it is simply a question of when.
For a differing point of view, scroll to p.50 to read Megan McArdle, and on p.51 is Kevin Hassett.
Do unfree countries grow faster?
Right now they do, check out this chart. But fear not for the consilience of liberty and utility. Kevin Hassett is citing Arrow when he should be invoking Robert Solow. The poorer countries are playing "catch-up" by adopting Western technologies and business practices. In the classic Solow model catch-up will give them a higher rate of economic growth but of course they still have a lower level of per capita income. And why are those same poorer countries playing catch-up more today than they did thirty years ago?
