Via Noah Smith I’ve seen this interesting article on the food industry – it is a long read, but worth it! But why couldn’t Big Food’s processing and marketing genius be put to use on genuinely healthier foods, like grilled fish? Putting aside the standard objection that the industry has no interest in doing so—we’ll […]
I have heard this sort of claim quite a bit from friends in recent months: World's 100 richest people earned enough in 2012 – $240bn – to end world extreme poverty 4x over #inequalityfacts — Max Rashbrooke (@MaxRashbrooke) September 18, 2013 Doesn’t that sound grand – if the richest 100 people in the world gave […]
A paper from the latest RBNZ bulletin. It has always been clear that the aim should be to increase the resilience of the system to adverse shocks, but is it possible to be more ambitious? The traditional prudential approach has had a strong focus on shock-absorbing capacity; for example, increasing capital requirements so that banks […]
Antonio Fatas discusses inherent bias in economics given our reference point – an important issue, and one that economists need to think on (Note: James wrote on this as well – we did our posts separately, so are focusing on different points). Specifically: This subtle (or not so subtle) bias in economic analysis is my […]
Sometimes you hear a comment that helps you see that something may be unclear, when economists may not have thought it was previous: @tylercowen But @NYTimeskrugman cannot acknowledge ENPOG bc (broken)model he relies on ignores endogenous money (credit). Ask @ProfSteveKeen — Hudson (@HCashny) September 21, 2013 (ENPOG here stands for endogenous potential output gap) The […]
A neat article (on Prod Blog here), and corresponding paper, by the Productivity Commission on New Zealand’s productivity performance over the past couple of decades. This is a descriptive paper, which runs along side the recent productivity symposium, and the upcoming set of papers which will turn up in the Productivity Commissions ‘Productivity Hub‘.