So often we hear that, even though the unemployment rate is falling in the US, employment is low. It is the low level of employment, and the lack of integration in the community that entails, that is causing so much anger over there. The lack of opportunity illustrated through the low employment rate is one […]
Yah, Nobel prize. All guys that deserved it … I just wouldn’t have expected them to get it together. To be honest, the reasoning makes sense though – they have all added significantly to the empirical analysis of asset prices, albeit in quite different ways 🙂 Still, don’t read me. Read Cochrane (here, here, here, here, […]
At the moment, many of my friends are getting married. At the same time some of my other friends who are not married are telling me they don’t understand why people get married. While I am not married, I think the idea of marriage is grand. I think it is a great way of dealing […]
In a recent email conversation with some other economists we realised that sometimes people get upset when we talk about people following incentives – as it makes them sound harmless. Within the conversation I discussed how this was due to the different ways economists and non-economists interpret the word. My email went as follows: It […]
Arthur Grimes recently gave an interview to Reuters, all I’ve seen so far is this write up via Raf on Twitter (cheers). Now Grimes is an incredibly good New Zealand economist, to put things in perspective I would generally put more weight on a single line of his opinion of something than I would on […]
Back in 1991, Larry Summers upset a lot of people as Chief Economist at the World Bank. His memo has been viewed as morally reprehensible, was cited in the second chapter of this book as indicative of the way economists ignore moral values, and was used as a key example in a philosophy class I sat […]