Results for “Larry Summers”
194 found

Measuring Hayek’s citation count

Jacob Levy has an update:

Proceeding from the other direction: a search just on Hayek restricted to business, economics, finance, law, linguistics, philosophy, political science, psychology, public policy, and sociology eliminated all the false positives I could find. 9385 . Searching for "milton friedman" in those same disciplines (and as far as I know there's no ambiguity in how to refer to him): 8088.

Now, I don't really think that citation counts are going to do the work Wolfers wants them to do here. But on his terms, Hayek is now out of Larry Summers' company, and into Friedman's.

He also shows that searching for further permutations on Hayek's name, such as adding a space where needed, ups the total number of cites a considerable amount.

Assorted links

1. Malaria and African economic development, via Chris Masse.

2. Lengthy profile of Larry Summers, from TNR, interesting and has new material.

3. Via Chug, markets in everything: topless coffee shop in Maine.  And, via Matt, a topless doughnut shop, same state.

4. Update on Massachusetts health care; interesting throughout.  Can they really do away with fee for service?  ""Really controlling costs requires just stopping spending,” said Stuart H. Altman, a professor of health policy at Brandeis University."  The Obama administration would be wise to keep those words in mind.

Public choice perspectives on the fiscal stimulus

If you want to worry less about the stimulus, try this argument.  Government will spend a certain amount of money in any case, but that spending can be of higher or lower quality.  Maybe you don't like the stimulus spending but is it possible that the spending alternatives would be even worse?  Lock Jason Furman and Larry Summers in a room for an hour, with no web connection and equipped only with a single crayon between them.  They still would come up with a better spending plan than would Congress and perhaps we are getting some version of what except they have more than a crayon.

Alternatively, perhaps progressives should be a little worried.  As Matt Yglesias admits, evidence on massive fiscal stimulus is iffy (through nobody's fault, it's simply hard to know).  But if you're a progressive, the opportunity cost of spending that money is a very non-iffy, highly-likely-to-succeed government program of some kind.  Call it public health infrastructure.  Maybe the content of the stimulus bill isn't as progressive as the alternatives.

If you're a libertarian, the government will just waste that money anyway.  Can it be that progressives should be more worried about the stimulus, in net terms, than libertarians?

The underlying fiscal model here is that Obama has more good ideas (good from a progressive point of view, at least) than he is allowed to spend money on but he will spend as much as he can.  These conclusions can be overturned to the extent that the prospect of a stimulus increases the total of what will be spent.

Addendum: Is Jeff Sachs agreeing with me?

A simple theory of which economists cultivate Ph.d. students

If your contribution as an economist is very fundamental, other people will use that contribution whether or not they were your students.  Lots of people use, or critique, the assumption of rational expectations.  So the inventors of RE don’t need students to propagate their fame.  Alfred Marshall’s fame today is mostly independent of the students he had (or did not have).

Having fundamental contributions is correlated with quality but within the top tier of quality there is considerable variation.  Arrow and Lucas had relatively fundamental contributions but in contrast Milton Friedman, Larry Summers, Robert Barro, and Olivier Blanchard are all more applied.  Their demand for students should be higher.  If you are an empirical economist, but invented an econometric technique which is fundamental, your demand for students should be relatively low.  Students might also prefer advisors who are less "fundamental," for fear of being overshadowed or from wanting to avoid the winner-take-all tier of the market.

Since at top schools the percentage of "fundamental" economists is declining over time, we would expect the distribution of doctoral students, across faculty, to become more even.

I thank Amanda Agan and some of her friends for a useful conversation on this topic.

Tradeoffs Don’t Exist

Or so say Larry Summers and Mark Thoma who argue that we can have a bailout and a stimulus package and still have tax cuts and more spending on energy, health care, education and all the other goodies that we have been promised.  Salesman Summers explains:

Just as a family that goes on a $500,000 vacation is $500,000 poorer
but a family that buys a $500,000 home is only poorer if it overpays,
the impact of the $700bn programme on the fiscal position depends on
how it is deployed and how the economy performs. The American
experience with financial support programmes is somewhat encouraging.
The Chrysler bail-out, President Bill Clinton’s emergency loans to
Mexico, and the Depression-era support programmes for housing and
financial sectors all ultimately made profits for taxpayers…

Does this sound familiar?  I can hear it now.  A vacation sir is consumption but a home, ah a home, that’s investment.  Investments pay off.  Just look at the American experience.  Rising home prices!  Never a downturn.  Isn’t that encouraging?  Hell, at prices like these you can hardly afford not to buy.  Yes sir, a home that’s a wise investment.  And that makes you sir, a wise investor.  And a wise investor, well a wise investor can certainly afford a nice vacation.    

Against Fiscal Stimulus

As the economy slows many people from Larry Summers to Martin Feldstein are calling for a fiscal stimulus.  I am not convinced.  Spending and tax decisions can
rarely boost an economy.

First, the money for any new spending or tax cuts has got to come from somewhere, right?  Thus there is usually substantial crowding out of any stimulus.

Second, by the time the new spending or tax cut
gets through the political process the economy has moved on and the
stimulus is no longer relevant except by accident.

Third, there just
isn’t that much discretionary spending to play with and even a large
increase in spending, say tens of billions, is too small to make much of
a difference in a 13 trillion dollar economy.

Fourth, in their desperation to "do
something" politicians will often do something foolish.  If a spending
increase or tax cut isn’t worthwhile on its own merits then it’s highly
unlikely to be worthwhile once we add in the benefits of "stimulus."  Thus, it’s one thing to argue for extending unemployment benefits as a matter of welfare it’s quite another to think that an increase in unemployment benefits will so increase spending as to reduce unemployment!  (The implicit view of Larry Summers.)

Economists may call for "temporary," "conditional," and "targeted" stimulus but they won’t be the ones designing the plan.  Spending
increases and tax cuts are policies with long term
consequences that we need to think about carefully. 

Thus, I do not favor a fiscal "stimulus"
package.

Do health sciences professors really prefer George Bush?

The topic of academic bias has been done to death in the blogosphere, nonetheless I was startled by this recent result.  When it comes to the 2004 election, polled health sciences professors were 48.1% for Kerry, 51.9% for Bush, at least according to one poll.  The social science professors were more than 87% for Kerry, and the physical and biological science professors were more than 77% for Kerry.   Even business professors were more than 65% for Kerry.

What is going on in the health sciences?  They don’t sound especially conservative to me.  On p.28 the authors note that in their sample this is mostly professors of nursing.

Note that the linked article contains some interesting remarks by Larry Summers on the topic of academic bias.

What is going on with the UC Regents?!!!!

First this:

In a showdown over academic freedom, a prominent
legal scholar said Wednesday that the University of California,
Irvine’s chancellor had succumbed to conservative political pressure
in rescinding his contract to head the university’s new law school, a
charge the chancellor vehemently denied.

Erwin Chemerinsky, a well-known liberal expert on constitutional
law, said he had signed a contract Sept. 4, only to be told Tuesday by
Chancellor Michael V. Drake that he was voiding their deal because
Chemerinsky was too liberal and the university had underestimated
"conservatives out to get me."

Now this:

After a group of UC Davis women faculty began circulating a petition,
UC regents rescinded an invitation to Larry Summers, the controversial
former president of Harvard University, to speak at a board dinner
Wednesday night in Sacramento.

Both of these decisions are shameful.

Carbon Offsets

Climate Care is a carbon offset firm used in an effort to be green by the UK Conservative party leader.  One of Climate Care’s projects pays Indian farmers to substitute human powered pumps for diesel pumps.  Opponents of the conservative party are having a field day:Treadle

Climate Care points out that even children can use treadle
pumps: ‘One person – man, woman or even child – can operate the pump by
manipulating his/her body weight on two treadles and by holding a
bamboo or wooden frame for support.’  Feeling guilty about your two-week break in Barbados, when you flew
thousands of miles and lived it up with cocktails on sunlit beaches?
Well, offset that guilt by sponsoring eco-friendly child labour in the
developing world!

Ala Larry Summers, I don’t see the problem.  Westerners pay Indian farmers to produce cotton, why is producing carbon-sinks any different?  It seems that some environmentalists are more interested in producing guilt than in reducing carbon.

Addendum: I am not claiming that carbon offsets work, in some cases the offset would have happened anyway so there is no net gain.  According to some, replenishing human energy creates more carbon than pumping oil.  But these are different objections.

Thanks to Mike Makowsky for the pointer.

Profile of Lant Pritchett

In The New York Times magazine, this Harvard economist is a strong advocate of open borders, or barring that, guest workers:

About 7 percent of
the rich world’s jobs are held by people from developing countries.  For
starters, he would like to see the poor get another 3 percent, or 16
million guest-worker jobs – 3 million in the U.S.  They would stay three
to five years, with no path to citizenship, and work in fields with
certified labor shortages.  He assumes that most receiving countries
would not allow them to bring families.  Taxpayers would be spared from
educating the migrants’ kids.  Domestic workers would gain some
protection through the certification process.

In effect, Pritchett
is proposing a Saudi Arabian plan in which an affluent society creates
a labor subcaste that is permanently excluded from its ranks…he
estimates his plan would produce annual gains of about $300 billion –
three times the benefit of removing the remaining barriers to trade.

He considers nationalism an "atavistic prejudice," but I think it is, at least for the time being, a necessary atavistic prejudice.  People will identify with some political unit or other and the current alternatives to nationalism usually are worse (my unverified theory is that Pritchett’s Mormon background plays a role in his views).  The key question is how many more people we can take in before this constraint starts to bite.

Not unrelated is this NYT article on the evolution of Larry Summers.

Intergenerational markets in everything?

We print a government bond called a Global Warming Bond.  These have stamped on
them: "I pay out 1000 indexed pounds in every year – beginning in the year 2050
and going on forever".   Bonds would be given out, as a subsidy, to those
people and organizations who reduce emissions today.

The bonds would have immediate value.  A market in them would spring up.  I shall
assume that their status as government bonds would make risk of default
negligible.  One might object to this, but I shall leave it at that.

The attractive thing about these bonds is that (leaving aside technical issues
about general equilibrium reallocations across asset classes) they would be
funded essentially by future taxpaying citizens.  Those earning and paying taxes
in 2050 onwards would fund them.  Our citizens, in 2007, would gain.

In this way, the unborn would subsidize us to cut carbon emissions.

Ha! There is general case for subsidizing virtuous behavior, but don’t think the future people are paying; they inherit both the tax liability and the bonds.  Our great-grandchildren pay only to the extent that the existence of the bonds causes us to feel wealthier, spend more, and leave smaller bequests.  Even Ph.d. economists miss that point with astonishing regularity.  That link is via Mark Thoma, who also links to commentary from Larry Summers and other luminaries.

Here is Mark’s new blog experiment.