Results for “series”
1036 found

That was then, this is now: a continuing series, Coasean George Washington edition

Land speculation was a natural and common preoccupation among the Founders. For some it became an economic affliction. “Hardly a prominent man of the period failed to secure large tracts of real estate, which could be had at absurdly low prices, and to hold the lands for the natural advance which increased population would bring,” wrote Albert J. Beveridge.27 For many, such speculation would prove a hazardous preoccupation. Virginia’s Henry Lee and Pennsylvania’s Robert Morris and James Wilson ended up in jail because of their debts from speculation. Washington biographer James Thomas Flexner noted that land speculation was “a fundamental aspect of American economic life, but it had become in the last few years an extremely tricky one. General [Henry] Knox was above the knees in financial trouble because of the new settlements he had started in Maine.”28 Speculation in land became particularly rampant in the early 1790s when the stability of the new republic seemed assured. Describing the process of speculation, historian Forrest McDonald wrote: “One worked or connived to obtain a stake, then worked or connived to obtain legal title to a tract of wilderness, then sold the wilderness by the acre to the hordes of immigrants, and thereby lived and died a wealthy man. Appropriately, the most successful practitioner of this craft was George Washington, who had acquired several hundred thousand acres and was reckoned by many as the wealthiest man in America.”

And:

Washington’s land holdings clearly affected his political outlook – first regarding England, and later regarding the United States. Washington thought big and thought about the implications of thinking big. Glenn A. Phelps wrote that Washington’s “extensive land-holdings in the West, as well as his frequent surveying expeditions to the frontier, had placed him within a circle of Virginia politicians with somewhat more enterprising, expansionist, westward-looking interests than their tidewater brethren.”59 Increasingly after the Revolutionary War, Washington’s land-holdings affected his preoccupation with the development of the Potomac River and a canal through the area where it was not navigable. Washington wrote a friend in 1785 that “unless we can connect the new States which are rising to our view in those regions, with those on the Atlantic by interest (the only binding cement, and not otherwise to be effected by opening such communications as will make it easier and cheaper for them to bring the product of their labour our markets, instead of going to the Spaniards southerly, or the British northerly), they will be quite a distinct people; and ultimately may be very troublesome neighbors to us.”

And:

Washington foresaw America’s great westward migration and he foresaw potential wealth for himself. Historian Edmund S. Morgan wrote: “Washington believed that as a private citizen pursuing his own interests he could still be working for the good of the nation. He engaged without a qualm in a scheme that would benefit him financially, while it bolstered American independence in a way that he thought was crucial…

Washington also supported infrastructure projects that would increase the value of his landholdings.  Here is the source, with the tip via MR commentator g. ruqt.

Here is my earlier post on Inconvenient Questions.

David Beckworth is starting a money/macro podcast series

David writes to me:

Today is the launch of a new podcast series on macroeconomics called Macro Musing and I am privileged to be the host. Each week, with the help of a special guest, we will get to explore in depth various macroeconomic topics. If want to go all wonky on macro this is the podcast for you!

So far I have recorded podcasts with the following guests: Scott Sumner, John Taylor, John Cochrane, Cardiff Garcia, Miles Kimball, Ramesh Ponnuru, and George Selgin. There have been a lot of interesting conversations covering topics such as the origins of the Great Recession, the safe asset shortage problem, negative interest rates, the fiscal theory of the price level, the Eurozone Crisis, Abenomics, the Great Depression, China’s economic problems, and alternative monetary regimes. In addition to these interesting topics, I have enjoyed learning how each guest got into macro, either as an academic or journalist, and how they see the field changing over time as new ideas and new technology emerge. I think you will find it fascinating too.

More guest are scheduled, including some Fed officials, but I would love to hear from you on what guests and topics you would like to see on the show. My first guest is Scott Sumner with whom I discuss his views on the Great Recession, NGDP targeting, and his new book on the Great Depression, The Midas Paradox.

I hope to make this a long-term project, but it success depends in part on you subscribing. So please subcribe via itunes or your favorite podcast app and spread the word. Let’s make this podcast a success together and who knows, maybe we can help make the world a better place.

The drone wars have begun, a continuing series

A man dubbed the Drone Slayer for shooting a miniature aircraft out of the sky has had a criminal case against him thrown out.

William Meredith drew his shotgun and took out a Phantom 3 drone after spotting it above his home in Hillview, Kentucky, this summer – landing him in jail and prompting legal proceedings.

Mr Meredith was charged with criminal mischief and wanton endangerment for destroying the $900 drone in July – but this week had both of them thrown out by a judge.

There is more here, via the excellent Mark Thorson.  And here is a previous installment in the series.

Accelerating the velocity of goods, a continuing series

Uber for private jets, sort of:

To make travel easier, and to avoid the headache of commercial flying, he [Aaron Smart] often uses JetSmarter, a start-up service that, for an annual membership fee [7k], allows him to fly on so-called empty legs, or private jets flying without passengers on their way to pick someone up.

…In some cases, the flights end up costing the same or less than first-class tickets on a commercial airliner.

Among the start-ups is Magellan Jets, which offers a subscription-based model where passengers can buy blocks of flight time and then get matched to planes through an iPhone app. Magellan users are not tied to a specific plane, which allows more flexibility.

Magellan Jets guarantees an aircraft — including turboprops and helicopters — within 10 hours of a customer’s request in the United States, or within 24 hours in Europe. The company, which is based in Quincy, Mass., and works with about 95 aircraft providers, conducts background checks on flight crews before every trip, said Magellan’s president, Anthony Tivnan.

The full story is here.

Prophets of the Marginal Revolution (a recurring series)

Los Angeles on cusp of becoming ‘major’ walkable city, study says.”

Despite its long love affair with the car, Los Angeles is on the cusp of becoming a “major” walkable urban area. And doing so could do wonders for its real estate market, at least in spots.

That’s the gist of a new report released Tuesday by SmartGrowth America and George Washington University, which measured the number of walkable urban neighborhoods in 30 big metro areas and looked at the potential to develop more.

The original MR post was here, and for the pointer I thank…Alex.

We are not as wealthy as we thought we were (a continuing series)

From Ylan Q. Mui at The Washington Post:

American households have rebuilt less than half of the wealth lost during the recession, according to a new analysis from the Federal Reserve, hampering the country’s economic recovery.

The research from the St. Louis Fed shows that households had accumulated net worth totaling $66 trillion at the end of last year. After adjusting for inflation and population growth, the bank found that meant families on average have only made up 45 percent of the decline in their net worth since the peak of the boom in 2007.

In addition, most of the improvement was due to gains in the stock market, according to the report, primarily benefiting wealthy families. That means the recovery for most households was even weaker.

“A conclusion that the financial damage of the crisis and recession largely has been repaired is not justified,” the report stated.

The countercyclical asset? (a continuing series)

Highly speculative, but fun to think about:

Four separate experiments, along with real-world data, all say yes. Our findings consistently supported the lipstick effect, as college-age women, when primed with news of economic instability, reported an increased desire to buy attractiveness-enhancing goods, along with a decreased desire to purchase goods that do not enhance one’s physical appearance. Our experiments also found that this increased desire for beauty products, clothing and accessories was fully mediated by a heightened preference for mates with resources.

While many journalists who have written about the lipstick effect have theorized that it represents women’s therapeutic spending on cheap indulgences, we found that the lipstick effect applies specifically to products that enhance beauty, even when those products are more expensive. Recession cues increased women’s desire to buy high-end cosmetics and designer clothing, but not to buy budget-line beauty products, which were rated less effective at improving one’s appearance.

Furthermore, we discovered that the lipstick effect and a woman’s desire to attract a mate with resources are unrelated to her independent resource access. Women of both higher and lower socioeconomic status expressed an increased desire to buy luxury beauty products when primed with recession cues. This suggests that an uncertain economic climate leads women to heighten mate attraction effort irrespective of their own resource need.

The story is here, and I thank VS for the pointer.

Model this (a continuing series)

From a profile of Donald Keene:

“He [Mishima] died, as you know, at the age of 45, leaving at least 45 stacked volumes of novels, plays, criticism, poetry.” Mishima slit his belly after leading a failed, and farcical, coup to restore the emperor’s power but Keene thinks he committed suicide because he was passed over for the Nobel Prize. During the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, Mishima had written Keene a letter with the line, “I envy the athletes who know if they are first, second or third.” Keene says: “That was all he said but I knew exactly what he meant.” The irony was that Kawabata, who did win the Nobel Prize, also committed suicide because of the pressure of living up to his new reputation.

Chopin’s piano sonata #2, a continuing series

…plans at the University of Denver to permanently move four-fifths of the Penrose Library’s holdings to an off-campus storage facility and renovate the building into an “Academic Commons,” with more seating, group space, and technological capacity, could make the university a flashpoint in the debate about whether the traditional function of storing books needs to happen on campus.

Here is more.

The countercyclical asset, a continuing series, white women’s hair products edition

Bridget J. Crawford, of the Pace University School of Law, serves up an entry:

This short essay is a reflection on the relationship between the economy and women’s hair. I suggest that examining women’s spending on hair care products during uncertain financial conditions provides insight into the gendered aspects of the economy. As the economy has declined, sales of home hair-care products targeted toward white women have increased. Major news outlets report on salon customers trying to stretch out the time between their regular $250 hair salon treatments. Certain women turn to home hair dyes to maintain conforming appearances. In popular culture, to have white skin and gray hair is to be old (unemployable and unattractive) or menopausal (unproductive and unsexual). An attempt to retain their hair color (natural or chosen) is, for certain women, an attempt to retain a currency of employability, utility and desirability.

The hair-care spending of African-American women (of all socio-economic classes), in contrast, appears to be less susceptible to economic cycles.

The next two sentences of the abstract shift the nature of the paper considerably:

African-American legal scholars have given voice to the complex role that hair can play in the personal, professional, social and legal lives of black women. I argue that only in a down economy do some white women grapple with their hair’s complex signaling function, including its link to race and privilege.

Hat tip goes to the always-excellent www.bookforum.com.  Here are previous installments in the series.

Mandates don’t stay modest, a continuing series

This remains an underreported story:

Should health insurers have to cover treatment of Lyme disease? What about speech therapy for autistic children? Or infertility treatments?

Can they limit the number of chemotherapy rounds allowed cancer patients? Or restrict the type of dialysis offered to people with kidney disease?

This week an independent advisory group convened by the Obama administration launched what is likely to be a long and emotional process to answer such questions…

Under the health-care overhaul law, beginning in 2014 all new insurance plans for individuals and small businesses will have to include a package of minimum "essential benefits" falling into 10 general categories – ranging from hospitalization, to prescription drugs, to rehabilitative and habilitative services. But Congress largely left it to Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius to decide how detailed to make the essential benefits package and what exactly to put in it.

Defenders of ACA do not in general like to confront the "at what margin?" question.  The rhetoric used to argue for the bill usually suggests that the mandate must indeed be extended.  I will keep my eye on this issue.  Here are previous installments in the series.