Matt Nolan

I’ve just discovered Debatepedia!

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In what could become an awesome resource for creating economics post, we have found Debatepedia.

We discovered the site after we found it linking to a post we did on progressive taxes in support of the argument that “progressive taxes adjust for random factors in wealth“. The full progressive tax debate is here. It is awesome how it provides background and short quotes summarising the arguments – while also providing links for people that want to get their hands dirty.

Truly awesome, and a great way for you guys to quickly find good counter-arguments to any dodgey points I try to make – not that you guys need any help 😉

Matt Nolan

Quote 12: Michael Lewis on incentives in Wall Street

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Michael Lewis:

He thought the cause of the financial crisis was “simple. Greed on both sides—greed of investors and the greed of the bankers.” I thought it was more complicated. Greed on Wall Street was a given—almost an obligation. The problem was the system of incentives that channeled the greed.

Found in the December 2008 portfolio magazine (ht Robbie Allan).

Matt Nolan

Dom post article: Time for a fiscal stimulus?

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In today’s Dom Post column we discuss whether a fiscal stimulus is necessary at the moment – our conclusion is that it is not.

Four criticisms I would have of my own logic are:

  1. There may be distributional reasons why you would want to change spending,
  2. An “improvement” in government spending would be beneficial,
  3. In the face of sticky prices and reference based utility from consumption (that marginal utility from consumption depends on consumption in the previous periods) there could be a role for stabilisation even if the shock is permanent.
  4. Fiscal policy is better targetted.

My answers to these would be:

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admin

TEST

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Matt Nolan

The rebirth of “Keynes”: A good or a bad thing?

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Over at Robert Reich’s blog, there is a discussion stating that now is the time for rising government spending in the US based on the “fact” that the government is the “spender of last resort” and that the economy has plenty of spare “capacity” (ht Mark Thoma at Economists View).

We have discussed fiscal policy before, and will discuss it again tomorrow. Now, I agree with chunks of this logic, but I feel that there is one gapping hole – the behaviour of prices!

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jamesz

Aborting crime

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Garth George at The Herald reckons that the root cause of all abuse and domestic violence is abortion. His position seems largely religious in nature so I can’t argue the point on his grounds. However, I was surprised to see reasonable-sounding commentators at Kiwiblog unsure whether George might be correct. This topic isn’t a new one and the most recent stab at it has been by the famous economist Steven Levitt and his co-author, John Donohue. In their paper they use statistical techniques to show that the drop in US crime in the ’90s was correlated with states’ legalisation of abortion. Read more