Blog Profile / Marginal Revolution
| URL : | http://marginalrevolution.com/ | |
|---|---|---|
| Filed Under: | Academics / Political Science | |
| Posts on Regator: | 3731 | |
| Posts / Week: | 37.9 | |
| Archived Since: | July 6, 2011 | |
Blog Post Archive
The forthcoming clustering of human capital
A radical change is taking place in the German job market: Today’s immigrants to Germany are better trained and have a higher level of education than native Germans, according to a study carried out by labor market researcher Herbert Brücker on behalf of the Bertelsmann Stiftung, a private think tank based in Gütersloh. Today, 43 [...]
Oops, and double oops…
Au pair programs are in danger of ending, a possible victim of legislation now moving through Congress… At issue is a provision of the bill that would bar any labor contractor from charging a fee to foreign workers being brought into the country. Supporters say the measure is aimed at preventing the exploitation of foreign [...]
Assorted links
1. Economic Rewards to Motivate Blood Donations, important summary of the evidence in Science. 2. Words that cannot be spoken: raw milk. 3. Econometrics by simulation blog. 4. EU to ban olive oil in dishes? Way to upset the Greeks even more. 5. How does copyright law work in space?
Assorted links
1. “Wanting to be liked.” 2. Trifecta (good photos too). 3. Hobson, underconsumption, globalization, and the great stagnation, by Robert Skidelsky; uneven but interesting. I’ve been waiting for this tradition to be rediscovered, I suppose Hilferding is next. 4. WSJ reviews the excellent Arnold Kling. 5. I am more pro-immigration than he is, but Ross [...]
Prisoner unemployment is rising in California
Prison labor, once best known for making license plates, has grown to 57 factories doing such work as modular building construction, toner cartridge recycling, shoemaking and juice packaging, according to its latest annual report. Convicts supply closed-captioning for television and transcribe movies into Braille… Yet even with workers paid 35 to 95 cents an hour, [...]
Painted into a corner?
According to the BoJ [Bank of Japan], a 100 basis-point increase in interest rates across all maturities would lead to mark-to-market losses equivalent to a fifth of tier one capital for regional banks, and 10 per cent for the major banks. At the same time, rising interest rates could undermine the government’s attempts to improve [...]
Assorted links
1. Finland photos from World War II. 2. Good review of the new Star Trek (full of spoilers), hail George Lucas. 3. What if you ran a natural-field Dictator Game? 4. Will China become more of a free market economy? 5. The Nikkei since the 1980s, and Billy Joel update. 6. Pricing ACA in California (a [...]
Can we imagine a world in which “expansionary” open market operations are in fact contractionary?
John Cochrane discusses Andy Kessler: The usual thinking is that bank reserves are “special.” They are connected to GDP in a way that Treasuries are not. In the conventional monetary view, MV = PY. Bank reserves, through a multiplier, control M. The bank or credit channel view says that bank reserves control lending and lending [...]
The Battle over Junk DNA
Last year the ENCODE Consortium, a big-data project involving 440 scientists from 32 laboratories around the world, announced with great fanfare that 80% of the human genome was functional or as the NYTimes put it less accurately but more memorably ”at least 80 percent of this DNA is active and needed.” What the NYTimes didn’t say was that this claim was highly [...]
Questions that are rarely asked
In my email, from Eric Crampton: Imagine the following deal, which is entirely not on any PPF so it’s not really a deal anyway. But imagine it. Genie offers a button. Push the button, and it burns the last n years of every journal in economics, along with all knowledge that those results ever existed, [...]
What did I learn from (another) re-read of Adam Smith?
Here is my MRU video on precisely that topic. By the way, Brandon Dupont has done for us this excellent video on John Law.
From the comments
Hazel Meade wrote: The banning of catastrophic-only plans infuriates me the most. Those are the only plans that are actually financially sensible for a healthy individual to purchase. Everything else on the market is a perverse by-product of the employer-based insurance system. Worst case scenario with a catastrophic-only plan is you end up with $10,000 [...]
Assorted links
1. Honeybees trained to find land mines. 2. Felix Salmon on bubbles, and Alen Mattich on bubbles, more from him here. And here is Krugman on the Japanese stock market plunge. 3. Ross Douthat, on the relationship between social and economic inequality. 4. Is this what an interview with a very smart person looks like? [...]
The economy that is Dubai (a different kind of driverless car)
Thousands of the finest automobiles ever made are now being abandoned every year since Dubai’s financial meltdown, left by expatriates and locals alike who flee in a hurry because they face crippling debts. With big loans to repay to the banks (unpaid debt or even bouncing a cheque is a criminal offence in Dubai), the [...]
Arrived in my pile
Edmund Burke: The First Conservative, by Jesse Norman. Charles Moore, Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography. I’ve browsed some of it, it looks really quite good, noting that in general authorized biographies bore me. Sheila Miyoshi Jager, Brothers at War: The Unending Conflict in Korea, the Korean conflicts in broader global perspective. Good advance reviews, looks [...]
When will most universities teach in English?
Higher Education Minister Genevieve Fioraso this past week introduced a bill that would allow French universities to teach more courses in English, even when English is not the subject. The goal, she explained, is to attract more students from such countries as Brazil, China and India, where English is widely taught, but French is reserved [...]
The most provocative, fascinating, and bizarre piece I read today
The author is Ron Unz, and the topic is what the media chooses to cover or not. His thoughts run in directions very different than mine (I favor invisible hand mechanisms to a much greater degree, for one thing), but here is the essay. It is entitled “Our American Pravda.” It is difficult to summarize. [...]
For how long will the U.S. suicide rate remain elevated?
In the United States, Julie Phillips, a sociologist at Rutgers University, was among the first researchers to frisk these middle-age suicides for deeper meaning. In 2010 she and a colleague declared the age range a new danger zone for self-harm. Many commentators took this as another fun fact about the boomers, not a cause for [...]
Assorted links
1. More from Ryan Avent on liquidity leaks. 2. Why many Germans wish to keep their small denomination coins. 3. Applied lessons from the Joplin tornado, and the same authors on the lessons from Soviet sports and chess dominance. 4. Quick quiz: did this help Spain or hurt Spain? 5. Norbert Wiener’s lost essay on [...]
Are we living in a time of asset bubbles?
Here is one typical complaint about bubbles, from Jesse Eisinger, excerpt: We are four years into the One Percent’s recovery. Now, we are in Round 3 of quantitative easing, the formal term for the Fed injecting hundreds of billions of dollars into the economy by purchasing longer-term assets like Treasury bonds and Fannie Mae and [...]