Do please leave your requests for topics, questions, and the like in the comments. I will try to cover some of them in the year to come or who knows maybe even tomorrow.
Request for requests
Previous post: GiveWell
Next post: Germany fact of the day (not about the euro, or is it?)
Next Comments →
Wealth is equal to raw naked power: the power to fund PACs; the power to endow university chairs to influence people; the power to tear down neighborhoods and erect shopping malls.
to what extent does the increase in wealth and income of the upper x% (relative to median or some other broad measure) mean that to much power is concentrated in the hands of to few people
one amusing example is from Kahnemann’s thinking fast and slow.
Small schools show the best results
b gates poured money into small schools
However, what gates didn’t realize is that this is a small numbers artifacts; small schools show the best and worst results cause with a small schoool you can deviate from the mean …there you have raw naked power having a huge influence on educational policy
Wealth still doesn’t give you more votes.
Wealth might equal power, but is it really worse in a democracy than under other forms of government? A comparative analysis would be insightful.
In the US, wealth gives you access to power.
In Russia (among many others), power gives you access to wealth.
Cute but you could reverse the countries and it would still be true. Wealth and power are pretty interchangeable anywhere. Lots of US politicos might start out less than rich, but the successes don’t ever end up that way.
Wealth gives you power to use the media and influence people the same way advertising does.
So your point is people do sh!t for money? Do we really need Tyler to explain that to us?
Wealth is certainly not “raw naked” power to tear down neighborhoods and erect shopping malls- only government and political connections can get you that.
I would like to encourage Tyler to encounter some pro-Hindu or at least neutral literature on the subcontinent, instead of just trendy PC and anti-Hindu stuff like that put out by Wendy Doniger and Muslim apologists. Frawley, From the River of Heaven might be a good start; also anything by Koenraad Elst.
Speaking of India, I would like Tyler to cover the results for the 2009+ India Pisa Results that were released last week.
http://www.livemint.com/2011/12/20010028/India-fares-poorly-in-global-l.html
Sadly very few people seemed to have noticed it while a year earlier everyone was hyperventilating about the Shanghai results.
Steve Sailer had an interesting discussion of the Pisa results–I agree it would be interesting to get Tyler’s take.
What exactly is the argument against gold? I’ve heard it said that there isn’t enough gold in the world to make it the only form of currency, but the gold bugs say that’s because gold is underpriced. If gold were priced appropriately, there would be enough gold to replace all of the world’s currency. What’s wrong with that argument?
The real problem with gold, in my mind, is that gold supply is every bit as determined by government policy as is paper money supply. The only difference is that paper money supply is determined by democratic institutions ultimately answerable to elected officials or the population, while gold supply is determined by the willingness of the totalitarian Chinese government to devote labor resources to its internal gold mines. China already holds a pretty powerful card with respect to our fiscal policy; I don’t want to give them leverage over our monetary policy, also. But maybe Tyler or Alex will tell me that I’m wrong about that.
Has gold mining output been very variable? I thought it wasn’t.
In Romania, Europe’s largest gold reserves have reportedly just been discovered.
I am on my way.
No more than 3% of all known gold reserves is in China, twice less than in the USA. You should worry more about Brazil (4%) and Australia/Russia (11% each).
It’s procyclical: the money-value of gold rises during recessions as people seek security, which raises the value of each unit of money, which is contractionary. That’s basically the mainstream argument.
Note that the money-value of gold under a gold standard would be determined by an issuing government, so it isn’t any more credible in the long-term than fiat currency in that sense. The government can change the standard or end its convertibility suddenly. Indeed, that is precisely what happened.
er, whoops. The real-value of gold rises during recessions.
Gold is almost the same as ‘fiat’ currency in that its value isn’t absolute (like say atomic weights), it’s whatever it’s perceived to be.
This is really a problem of currency as a medium of exchange anyway. There’s no way to eliminate uncertainty and human action from modern, complex, global economics, which is really what goldbugs wish we could do. That and to take treasure-baths with Ron Paul:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xIxdXh_CMyY
I agree with this – the essence of Goldbuggery is a psychological dislike for uncertainty and discretion, but gold doesn’t solve any problems it just sounds stable and old-fashioned and traditional.
CBBB, you have posted this comment repeatedly, and its nothing more than verbal diarrhea. commodity money resolves the two problems that plague fiat money. the first being that public choice economics will inevitably lead to the political class printing money in order to purchase votes. they finance the “bread and circuses” through the regressive flat tax that is inflation. governments cannot print gold, hence most politicians, bureaucrats, and economists despise it. the second problem that gold resolves is it limits the leverage of commercial banks. the threat of a bank run by depositors for their gold keep banks in check. today, there is outrageous risk taking because they believe the central banks will not let them fail, and are repeatedly proven right.
because of all this, gold is denigrated in the media for the sake of . the fact of the matter is, an ozt of gold purchased today will be worth tomorrow…an ozt of gold. the value in terms of dollars or any other fiat currency is irrelevant. the holders of bullion bars and rounds can sleep soundly knowing XX.XX% of their wealth is safe from the political class and the financial elites. they do not need to fear a Weimar Germany or Zimbabwe-like event.
Why do universities (in the US and Britain only) have endowments, and should they? And why does no one but Henry Hansmann write about this question?
Everyone wants to be well endowed, don’t they?
I’d like to see you engage some of the heterodox crowd given the field’s failures wrt the recent crisis.
E.G. Keen, Vienneau, Yves Smith
Isn’t Tyler still basically Austrian, albeit an Austrian with a more subtle capital theory than is generally the case? When did that stop being heterodox?
Actually, it would be nice if Tyler provided his personal summary of the ratex/ABCT theory laid out in Risk and Business Cycles. The discussion at coordinationproblem.org descends into bickering even on a good day.
Tyler is not an Austrian. And Austrian economics can say it’s heterodox but until it stops coming to virtually the same policy conclusions as ‘orthodox’ free market economics I won’t be able to take that assertion seriously.
Keen and such distinguish Austrian economics from the orthodoxy, as far as I am aware, even if they disagree.
Austrians and the mainstream differ most obviously in monetary policy, for one thing.
Hear Hear
Keen actually discusses how closely linked Austrianism and neoclassicism are in his latest book.
Monetary policy is the only area they differ.
“Monetary policy is the only area they differ.”
Well, that’s rather wrong. To take only one other area of marked difference, there is methodology. Maybe you shouldn’t go to Keen for an explanation of how they differ, but rather look at what actual self-avowed Austrians and Neo-classicals have said on the subject.
As for drawing the same policy conclusions… to the extent it’s true, and to the extent that Austrians even among themselves draw the same conclusions, it’s not a sufficient reason to object to their being called “heterodox”. Further, you seem to indicate a preference for the heterodox, hence your defensive need to dissociate it from Austrianism. Your dislike of the policy conclusions is certainly not the touchstone of validity correct theories of econnomics.
Serious question: how is the Austrian school heterodox? If it’s heterodox, what’s supposed to be mainstream, and how does it differ? It certainly doesn’t seem like Keynes is all that favoured by most policy writers.
Well for one, most Austrians are against central banking altogether. Everyone might not be pro-Keynes, but that hardly makes Austrians also orthodox as there are plenty of bigger and more prominent schools- the Chicago School being the notable one. Don’t forget the monetarists, supply siders, etc.
The mainstream is the New Keynesian three-equation model, built from a merger of two of the three propositions of monetarism that Friedman set forth, plus a lot of neoclassical individually-rational microfoundations that induce a broadly Keynesian dynamic (where expansionary policy is expansionary).
Austrians reject ratex, reject neoclassical modeling, reject monetarism, and reject the broadly Keynesian dynamic, so…
+1
Right but they do seem unable to come to any conclusion other than government = bad, which neoclassical libertarians also do.
In 2012 you will embrace bitcoin, so I’d like you to close 2011 with another ill-researched dismissal of the topic. “It can’t work as a currency if the price moves wildly relative to the dollar” or something like that again would be cool.
Who’s right about Glass-Steagall? http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1507803 http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1505488&rec=1&srcabs=1507803
Favorite musicologists, academic or otherwise.
More about chess! Make it into a chess blog, with economics on the side.
I guarantee: once you write about strip chess, your blog will skyrocket.
By the way: any girls interested?
What proportion of the world’s population is employed (defined by working at a task that is not unorganized food gathering for at least 20 hrs per week)? How will this proportion change over the next 100 yrs. Will productivity gains obviate the need for more than a small fraction of the population to work? In such a world, how is economic output distributed? Who gets to, or has to, work? Do the workers run things, or are they a servant class to a tiny percentage of the population who are information controllers?
Good topic. I second this one!
Are you where you want to be (what you write is really what you want to write,) or are you currently doing what you do because it’s a path to getting to where you think you want to be?
And where is the shortcut?
He’s a tenured professor with a blog, where else could he go?
To a more prestigious university. To an “industry” job that pays 10X more. To the US Treasury? Retire and become a full time writer. Always lots of choices.
This space has mentioned the cultural infrastructure necessary to sustain a republican form of government (usually mis-labeled “democracy”) and/or capitalism. Especially given the current financial troubles, it seems that this would give rise to more than one line of exploration.
1) To what extent do free-market economics and republicanism depend on/support each other?
2) There appears to be a positive feedback cycle wherein it is easier to expand the scope of government in the economy of a republic than to contract it. What mechanisms might counteract this phenomenon? Are we doomed to only experience these liberties cyclically?
3) In the West, the twentieth century bore witness to dramatic reductions in the cultural power of numerous institutions (church, family, fraternal organizations, even habitual groupings for entertainment). What effect does this atomization of our social spheres affect republicanism? Capitalism?
4) The US electoral college has been criticized on several fronts. One defense is that (except for Reconstruction) it has prevented mere regional parties from gaining power, and ensured that we will always have two centrist parties. In turn, these centrist parties create a relatively stable political and economic environment, encouraging long-term investment. Agree or disagree? Evidence?
5) Have the regulations increasing reporting requirements and the quarterly reporting of corporate financial results made corporations reluctant to invest in long-term and/or more risky ventures? Should we be encouraging companies to be privately held as a partial remedy?
6) What is the rate of economic/political acculturation of immigrant families into various host nations? Has the rate changed? Do concerns of this matter support the policy of immigration quotas to preserve the infrastructure necessary to preserve capitalism/republicanism? If so, what is the optimal flow?
Admit the error of your ways and resign
Shut up.
Then what the hell would you do with all your surly, unemployed time besides play hard to get with your internet crush?
Nice one I was trying to participate in a civil discussion here and you have to resort to personal attacks.
LOL. Irony much?
I don’t follow
The next time you post here in a civil manner, without resorting to attacking Mr. Cowen, will be the first.
Follow that.
No, you’re not trying to participate in anything. You’re just being annoying.
What do you think of Noam Chomsky’s work?
+1
Which area? Linguistics and grammar? I thought that was pretty impressive. The rest of it, not so much — so I guess I would like to hear Tyler’s take.
I am interested in knowing how the Housing industry’s percentage of GDP has fluctuated over the past 30 years and what if any effect this may have over the overall GDP?
One would think that by now everyone has a house already.
I’ll inherit my parents’ one, why should I build one of my own?
Your German sense of humor isn’t easy to understand. Surely you aren’t ignoring scrappage, population growth, rising/falling affluence, changing living patterns, etc?
Our population is shrinking.
Some cities actually blow up blocks of apartments (after the remaining tenants have moved) to reduce supply and regain land for parks.
Yes, I’m aware of the demographic challenges in Europe. But I think the question you replied to was about US housing.
Given the events of the last 3-4 years, what were you wrong about? What were you right about? Is there an underlying lesson?
More science content, particularly science content focused on scientists. Do what you can to make them celebrities, at least for the nerds reading this blog.
Why don’t we trust/allow computers to set monetary policy or perform other tasks, like redistricting?
What rule would the computer use to set monetary policy? Or is this the same as Sumner’s NGDP idea?
That would be a question to be answered after agreeing to do it, wouldn’t it?
Actually, courts have developed rules on this and it would be interesting to write the algorithm to see how challenged and unchallenged districts depart from it.
I suspect there is a conspiracy of silence between the two parties for most of the districts.
I believe the first impartial system was put in place in the South during the Civil Rights movement.
Sorry, but the USC rule that requires that the census counts of congressional districts not vary by more than one in a given state REQUIRES that the lines be screwed up at the micro level. We won’t have decent lines until the lawyers on the court admit that they are not mathematicians, and leave the game theory to us.
And yes, it is fascinating to watch the duopoly play the redistricting game. Of all the ways that political power is corrupted, this is the most pernicious, as it necessarily gates the others.
Then your question is really “what monetary policy should we set.”
On two occasions I have been asked,—”Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?” … I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.
—Charles Babbage
Because I don’t trust the programmers of these computers.
Make more appearances on EconTalk please.
Some more on a single land tax, please. Would it have dampened the housing bubble? OK, it’s politically difficult, but is that a reason not to talk about it?
Have you read Matt Ridley’s “The Rational Optimist”? Thoughts?
http://marginalrevolution.com/?s=Ridley+Optimist
Thanks, Gabe.
What I’d love to see is Tyler make some sort of a Simon-Ehrlich wager . Can Tyler announce a public wager on MR that we might then find a counter-party in the blog-sphere (Krugman? Taleb? ).
Not sure what might be a good betting point though. Bitcoins? Death of the Euro? Some metric of TGS?
I’ll bet against death of the Euro any time.
+1. A few countries may get kicked out, but there will forever be a currency union between at least a few European nations.
Why don’t hotels include toothpaste in their free toiletries?
+1
Toothpaste mafia?
Yes!
Greater heterogeneity of tastes than, say, shampoo. And I don´t just mean flavor, but other features including medical ones.
What’s the incidence of hotel customers wanting psoriasis or color-safe shampoo versus those wanting fluoride-free or sensitivity-reducing toothpaste? I’m not sure heterogeneity explains it.
Corporate Personhood: is it the preferred mechanism of capitalist organization and why/why not?
Your question needs further definition. First, what is the universe of legal constructs available for one or more persons to build a business? Partnerships, limited liability companies (LLCs), etc.?
What are the rules to insulate the partners/shareholders from personal liability — i.e., if the partnership goes bankrupt, the partners are often personally liable for the partnership’s debts. Not true for corporations. If it were, then hardly one would ever invest their retirement in a company. It would really stink to be on the hook for more than you invested.
Also, what do you mean by personhood? The ability to contract and hire people? It would be hard to run a business if you can’t hire anyone.
Dear Prof Cowen:
May I offer my thanks for all the hard work you put into this blog ?
As to things for next year:
I think we all agree that the economy is not doing well, and that the current slump is the worst since the great depression.
There are various views on what actions we can take to ameliorate the situation.
I think I understand two of these views: There is a camp that says we should pump money (helicopter drops) into the economy – I think this is what Dr. Krugman advocates.
There is also a camp that advocates taxcuts and reductions in gov’t regulations; I think this is the view of the GOP freshman and many of the candidates in the GOP field for the 2010 presidential nomination.
without debating the merits of these, and other proposals you may know of, I would like to know, what happens if we try one of these ideas, and it doesn’t work.
IF we borrow, say 1 T dollars, and the economy doesn’t improve, or if we cut tax rates on (say) the upper 1% by 50%, and the economy doesn’t improve, what then ?
And how does this change our views on what we should or shouldn’t do
Actually, the economy is doing better than it is generally portrayed in the media. Still a long way to go, but far better than 2 years ago and nowhere near as bad as the worst periods of the 1981-2 recession, for example.
If you are college educated, your unemployment rate is 4.5%. Yes there is a really rough transition going on right now for uneducated, lower skilled labor. But they are a minority of the labor force. Corporate profitability has never been stronger, personal debt service is the lowest its been since the mid 90s, consumption is higher than when this recession started, etc.
The Great D can no longer be reasonably compared to our current situation.
What are the impacts in moving from home production/shadow economy to the market economy, and vice versa. For example, around 1880-1900 upper middle class families in the North had Irish maids and cooks, paying salaries, while the kids played in the streets. As the home gets electrified, housewives at the same social level started doing their own housekeeping, just buying appliances. Then in the 60′s or so people started eating TV dinners and eating fast food. With the freed-up time they started being helicopter parents, paying lots more attention to their kids (see Megan McArdle’s recent post on the decline of spanking). Didn’t all these changes affect statistics on productivity, etc.?.
I would like more content on schools and healthcare. Specifically, I heard somewhere recently (though I can’t remember where) that if you factored out car crashes and homicide, America would have the highest life expectancy in the world. I want to know if that is true and what kind of implications it should have (if true) on policy. But a general fleshing out of both these topics would be appreciated since there seems to be so much data.
Can you simplify macroeconomics for someone with far less intelligence than you? I know that’s a tall order, but macro doesn’t make intuitive sense to me. What are your favorite analogies/narratives for how the fed works?
What was the most important statistic/data of 2011? A top ten would also be nice.
That’s groveling a little bit. Surely you can use wikipedia. Fed has a dual mandate. Is the currency authority. Monitors financial activity and has private information on the large investment banks. If I had to say, they make sure the practical problems of the implementation of money does not hinder economic activity.
Macro is the worst performing (empirically) area of economics. Experts can only guess and offer a string of logic.
why isnt there a developed “free north korea” movement in the west as there is for iran, myanmar, cuba, tibet, etc?
What do the North Korean exiles say about it?
Or do they all go to South Korea and just wait for reunification? I am from West Germany and I think maybe it’s the same as in East Germany: if you have an alternative that you can escape to, a country that welcomes you openly, supports refugees financially, and where language and culture are similar, then emigrating is enough.
Iranians on the other hand have nowhere to go, they don’t want t live in Iraq or Afghanistan. Same for Tibetans. Different though or many Cubans who could come to Miami, I concede.
Even many of the people who leave North Korea are STILL Pro-North Korea – unlike the Cuban exiles, etc.
http://www.rjkoehler.com/2011/12/19/a-setting-sun-on-shenyang/
The North Korea situation is pretty different since it is a regime fundamentally based on nationalism in a way that has not really been seen in the world since the 1940s.
I think it’s got to do with having a critical mass of exiles settle in the US to get noticed and make noise.
very insightful question.- congrats
1. Co-ops: I tool a uni course on cooperative firms and found the literature to be pretty polarized. I’m surprised by the lack of discussion of that literature in this network of blogs as it seems to be an important and interesing debate.
2. Biology: you do a lot on psychology but it seems like biology is opening up to a lot of network/ dynamics/ complex systems theory that has an analog in economic systems.
3. Canada and austrailia/NZ: theyre important countries. you do a lot more on the US and emerging markets and Europe.
4. Epistemology. You’ve said philosophy doesn’t fit blog formats well but this has a lot of applications in Econ and you are insightful in this area
5: yourself. I want to 2nd the people requesting an explication of your personal ideology
#3 – Canada sucks should have been annexed by the US in the 19th Century so that I could move to California or NY without a visa
6. A substantial post on fiscal policy. I read via Krugman the new David Romer paper claiming to settle the effectiveness of fiscal policy with an abundance of new studies. Do you agree? I’ve always been under the impression that fiscal policy was weak and that the multiplier was “roughly zero”.
I’d like to see more on this also. Krugman says the other side is stupid. The other side says Krugman is stupid. Is it all just bias?
Is fear still more valuable than love – or would Machiavelli have to rewrite in 2012? Or would he even mention love this time around?
How do culture and economics mix? For example I remember in a post this year it was mentioned that Germans are frugal and expected the Greeks to also be frugal. Are some cultures simply more economically sound than others?
Ja!
(Says the German.)
I think Machiavelli wrote that FOR PRINCES it was better to be feared then loved (ie this rule was not meant to be universally applied to all political situations). He also wrote about republics and I believe preferred republics to principalities.
I was thinking of Machiavelli in terms of what advice he might give to modern princes and other non-republics, which seem to be re-evaluating the love/fear issue right now after the Arab Spring. What would he have written to al-Assad, Gaddafi, Kim Jong-un, The Communist Party of China, and so on? Anyway would you say that the fear/love question really doesn’t apply to republics? Perhaps it is better for the government of a republic to be more loved than feared, but many would say that the amount of love and fear required for the government to survive changes with the nature of the times, which I find interesting.
I thought about somehow working the words marginal revolution into the last sentence but I resisted.
An economist’s perspective on loneliness; how to optimise (temporary) period of time to be spent alone.
Set MB=MC
haha
What precisely is a financial meltdown. ‘They’ said if TARP isn’t passed or AIG isn’t bailed out, for instance, there would be a meltdown. Lets say a financial meltdown starts at 8 AM, on Monday 2nd Jan 2012. What happens at 9 am? What happens on Tuesday, what happens in a weeks time? How terrible a thing is a financial meltdown?
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/11_18/b4226012481756.htm
I’d love for you guys to write about economics as a science–to what extent economics IS a science, and if so, in what way. Specifically, I’d like for you to support/ defend/ criticize the Austrians’ idea that economics is a “deductive science” to which the concepts of validation and falsifiability do not apply.
To no extent is Economics a science
Somewhat related, MR is good about pointing to interesting critiques of their views by others in their field. But what premises do Cowen, Krugman, Caplan, Delong, etc share? Are there good / worthwhile / interesting critiques of those premises?
I’m asking for more philosophy tags.
1. I’d encourage you to read the Arsenal of Democracy, a first-hand account of the U.S. economic mobilization prior to and during WW2, written by Donald Nelson, the chairmen of the War Production Board. It begins with Roosevelt giving him nearly dictatorial power over private and public production, and is an incredible story of how people and firms put competition aside for something larger. Whether it was the acquisition of aluminum, rubber, or engines, this is an uplifting history of success in a variety of industries. I’m a capitalist through and through, but there are some important anecdotes and lessons here that are never the topic of history courses I’ve seen taught at any level. I have a copy myself that is quite marked up, and would be happy to point you to some of the most insightful passages.
2. Last time someone told me that I could “sell ice to eskimos,” it got me thinking: is there anyone in the world that does just that? I figure there must be, albeit on a small scale. Perhaps there are other idioms which could be looked at more literally, and combined they might make a great feature piece.
3. A look at the diamond industry and prices over time. How are prices maintained if synthetic and CVD diamonds are now nearly indistinguishable?
#3 Huh? The same way the price difference between Champagne and Sparkling Wine is maintained. Could you make something as good as Cristal using grapes from outside Champagne? Probably
Could you charge as much as Cristal for your product being labeled “Sparkling Wine”? NOPE
PhD in Economics Please
+1
I got my wife a synthetic diamond (not our engagement ring, but one subsequent) because she like me doesn’t wish to add to exploitation of diamond workers. But not all diamond recipients would be so receptive. I’d wager a guy who didn’t clear that first with his beloved would be considered cheap if he told her and a liar if he didn’t.
I got my wife a synthetic diamond
You should have given her a piece of high quality glass instead. Just from looking at it, you, she, and 99.9% of all other people would never be able to tell it from a real diamond, synthetic or not.
Understood but the synthetic is more neat-o, and it cuts glass, and it was still inexpensive.
Is Alfred Marshall’s Principles of Economics still a good text for learning economics?Is any of it outdated? Is there a better choice, other then Smith, which is available as a free e-book?
What would happen to the economy if and when astronomers detect a large asteroid in a collision path to the Earth? I suppose if the time to collision is short and people believe no action can avoid the disaster, incentives to save will disappear, bank runs will follow and hyperinflation. If the time period is such that a possible action , like deflecting the asteroid trajectory , has a non-zero probability, some people will nevertheless decide not to save anymore and maybe the interest rate will have to go up. Several scenarios can be imagined. Is it possible to write a model?
Invite a person to blog a headline piece where you are not the expert.
Create a point-counterpoint debate between two experts on the same subject on the same website.
More on William Barnett’s book and thought. By more, I mean critical evaluation, and maybe a suggestion for avenues for the non-economist to approach.
What do you think of Cal Tech’s Social Sciences PhD program compared with mainstream Econ programs? Does the lack of macro make it more intellectually honest?
Reading the description this sounds like what an Econ PhD SHOULD be
Have Tyrone write more posts. Many more posts. On topics of his choosing.
(And have him co-author with Alex occasionally.)
Yes! More Tyrone, please!
What do you think of MBA students? Is the degree anything more than a signaling tool?
What do you think of the expansion in graduate education? Is the signal being degraded by the increasing number of graduate programs? What will be the consequences?
I’d like stuff on commercial trust mechanisms in System D regions. How do they handle things escrow, loans, investments, dispute resolution and restitution and so forth and product quality concerns such as branding and proving that the product is safe for use and other things in that area.
Also security mechanisms for dealing with thieves or interlopers.
That’s a lot of stuff, hope you can get to at least a little of it.
+5
I think maybe you have covered this in some post, but you could talk about the relationship between food, the great discoveries, and the beginning of colonialism. After all the spice trade as a important driver of the great discoveries.
+10
Look at the social costs of HOV lanes versus benefits: increased accidents, death, loss of property along with increased traffic waiting times versus fuel savings. Maybe there is some evidence out there on this?
Feijoada.
Discuss the way in which higher education makes the taxation system far more progressive than is generally observed. To wit, the “rich” ($250k+ in income) have to pay upwards of $250k to send their children to college, while those making under say $75k, pay close to nothing, with a slide scale between those numbers. For those near the bottom end of the “rich” threshold, college expenses can move their effective tax rate well above the 60% mark, while the aid received by those at the other end should be considered income in this analysis.
Similarly, is there really a middle-class squeeze, or do I just think there is?
If I made less, my kid could have gotten substantial financial aid from, say, Harvard.
If I made more, the tuition wouldn’t really have made a dent in my lifestyle.
In the middle, with no financial aid, a top school doesn’t make as much sense as a school one tier down.
I think the problem is sharp eligibility cutoffs. There’s a step-change at some income level that causes this; rather have a smooth variation from high-aid to no-aid as a function of income / wealth.
How do we actually get banks that are “small enough to fail”?
Is the Euro crisis really mostly about keeping banks afloat (again)?
More Tyrone wouldn’t be bad.
1. Why do we want our economies to grow at large rates? What would be the downside to having planned growth at 1-2% yearly, with an adequate plan for long-term resource expansion, unless we know for granted that there will be more resources for us to use (which we currently do not)?
2. Climate and economics related stuff would also be interesting. Where’s the value for you, Tyler, in protecting the environment, and where does it stop? What should be done more, what less?
1. Resources are not used arithmetically more with economic and population growth. Technology has allowed us to use ever less of certain ones, and completely substitute away from others. This will not cease.
2. He covers this a lot already.
My suggestion: Why has the Northeastern US — despite having the world’s leading universities and being the global epicenter of finance — created so few innovative technology companies in the past 30 years? Nobody thinks it is odd when people like Bezos and Zuckerburg leave the NE to start their companies. We take it for granted that if you want to do technology you should relocate to the West Coast. If we were comparing two nations, we would call this a brain drain.
There is a fair amount of innovation out east, especially compared to other nations or even other parts of the US. Just off the top of my head I think of EMC, AOL, and Foursquare (not to mention GE, etc) as E Coast founded companies. Only ‘Silicon Valley’ does much more. SV has the critical mass of people and culture devoted to venture capital, but it’s not a monopoly.
Next Comments →
Comments on this entry are closed.