Below you will find a feed of the economics-related web sites that I find particularly interesting, insightful, entertaining, etc. (In other words, you are getting pretty much an edited view of my Google Reader.) My purpose in doing this is to provide readers with a portal for a wider range of information than I can provide myself. I will add new sources here as I come across them, and feel free to email me with suggestions for sites that you think should be included. It’s not practical to have too many sites incorporated here, so I will keep a list below both of included sites and sites that are not included but worth checking out individually. (Some of these are sites that are great but are not updated frequently enough for them to make sense in the feed.)
I am still working on the formatting, so please bear with me. For now, the page displays the last 50 posts in round robin fashion from the following sites:
- Marginal Revolution
- Greg Mankiw’s Blog
- Freakonomics Blog
- NYT Economix Blog
- Slate’s Moneybox
- Nudge
- Megan McArdle
- Environmental Economics
- The Becker-Posner Blog
- NPR’s Planet Money
- EconomistMom.com
- EcoComics
- xkcd
- Indexed
- Dilbert
The following sites are not currently included in the feed below, but are interesting nonetheless:
- The Consumerist
- Think Like An Economist
- Slate’s Undercover Economist
- Above The Crowd
- The Daily Show Economics Forum
- Economic Policy Review
- Economic Deficit Disorder
- Piled Higher And Deeper
- The Sports Economist
- The PULSE Review
Marginal Revolution
Small steps toward a much better world.
The Chinese fapioa, or reverse tip
by Tyler Cowen
3 Feb 2012 at 1:28pm
In China a fapioa ? the official receipt used for expense claims has a resale face value of 2 ? 10% of face value ? leaving one behind in a restaurant or taxi is the equivalent of giving a tip (in a culture where tipping is uncommon) and not requesting one allows the person or [...]
xkcd.com
xkcd.com: A webcomic of romance and math humor.
Wrong Superhero
2 Feb 2012 at 10:00pm
Greg Mankiw’s Blog
Random Observations for Students of Economics
Good News (both for job seekers and for one person trying to hold onto his job)
by noreply at blogger.com (Greg Mankiw)
3 Feb 2012 at 8:54am
Good news today about employment. The 243,000 increase in jobs is a very solid number. The graph below shows how the prices at Intrade reacted when the news was released at 8:30 am. President Obama’s probability of being reelected rose by about 2 percentage points. Click on the graphic to enlarge.
Freakonomics » Blog
The Hidden Side of Everything
TV?s Relationship to Mental Retardation and Autism
by Freakonomics
3 Feb 2012 at 11:32am
TV is bad for children. Wait, no it’s not. Yes, it is! And it’s really bad for their hearts!
Here’s the latest paper on the topic, from Michael Waldman, Sean Nicholson, and Nodir Adilov. Using a natural experiment to rule out the possibility of reverse causation, the authors find “a strong negative correlation between average county-level cable subscription rates when a birth cohort is below three and subsequent mental retardation diagnosis rates, but a strong positive correlation between the same cable subscription rates and subsequent autism diagnosis rates.”
Economix
Explaining the Science of Everyday Life
Reader Response: Bible-nomics
by By CATHERINE RAMPELL
3 Feb 2012 at 1:35pm
Readers respond to a post about anticapitalist sections of the bible with some other examples.
Indexed
PUBLISHED WEEKDAY MORNINGS as the COFFEE BREWS. FOR MORE randomness GO TO jessicahagy.info
Go on, look behind the curtain.
by Jessica Hagy
3 Feb 2012 at 11:31am
Share and Enjoy:
Slate Articles
Stories from Slate
The World?s Most Popular Online Newspaper
by Will Oremus
3 Feb 2012 at 3:44pm
The world?s most popular online newspaper is not the New York Times, USA Today, or the Wall Street Journal. You may not have ever visited it on purpose. If you?re American, you may not have even heard of it. It?s the Daily Mail.
Nudge blog
From Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein’s “Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness”
We?ve moved to www.nudges.org. Come with us.
by nudgeblog
27 Feb 2010 at 12:08pm
Nudges.wordpress.com has been a great home for the Nudge blog over the past year and a half, but it’s time to move on. Where to? www.nudges.org. That’s right, we’re taking over our first home and revamping it for the future. We’ve added new social media capabilities that let you share our posts on facebook and [...]
Megan McArdle : The Atlantic
Atlantic content from Megan McArdle
Komen Changes Its Mind on Planned Parenthood, But Will Donors Come Back?
by Megan McArdle
3 Feb 2012 at 9:21am
So apparently Susan G. Komen has reversed its decision to fund Planned Parenthood. Just as it wasn’t surprising that they might want to gently disconnect themselves from the abortion rights movement, it’s also not shocking that once this issue became political, pro-choicers mobilized faster and harder than pro-lifers did. For one thing, as I noted yesterday, the issue of breast cancer has long been broadly within the “women’s groups” umbrella that includes abortion rights, and for another, people react more strongly to losses than to possible gains. If Komen had never funded Planned Parenthood, it wouldn’t have been a big deal . . . but once they did, withdrawing the money was a political statement.
And just as I wasn’t outraged yesterday by the decision to withdraw money, I also think they’re well within their rights to reinstate it if they think that doing so will best further their mission. I doubt that this is over — pro-lifers are now going to have their own round of outraged protest. And to be fair, I do think that they should offer give back any money they raised over the last two days, since that was mostly coming from pro-lifers who were voicing support for the organization’s decision not to fund Planned Parenthood. But other than that, I think it’s their right to decide what advances their mission–and of course, every potential donor’s right to decide if that’s what they want to support.
The really interesting question is this: will the pro-choice donors come back? Or has Komen damaged its brand to no purpose? Only time will tell.
Dilbert Daily Strip
The Official Dilbert Daily Comic Strip RSS Feed
Comic for February 3, 2012
2 Feb 2012 at 11:00pm
Environmental Economics
Economists on Environmental and Natural Resources News, Opinion, Analysis
If you watch this video closely you’ll see me singing background vocals towar…
by John Whitehead
3 Feb 2012 at 2:20pm
Via No Depression:
Athens, GA: Some of the greatest songs were written to give voice to anxiety, despair and unwanted change. ?After it?s Gone?, a new single just released by Patterson Hood and the Downtown 13, was inspired by the threat of a Walmart in the heart of the downtown that nurtured the band?s career. Hood, singer, writer and guitarist for the band Drive-By Truckers assembled The Downtown 13, a musical collective made up of some of Athens, Georgia’s finest musicians to celebrate Athens, GA’s beauty and vibrant musical heritage and to protest a developer’s proposed building of a massive mixed use development in downtown Athens, anchored by a 94,000 sq. foot Walmart.
*Not really, I volunteered, but I guess they thought I was too busy as Patterson Hood’s guitar tech.
Planet Money
Planet Money
The Friday Podcast: Is Hosting The Super Bowl Worth It?
3 Feb 2012 at 4:31pm
An economist presents the case against hosting the Super Bowl. Bonus: today’s show is co-hosted by NPR’s Mike Pesca.
Ecocomics
Where Graphic Art Meets Dismal Science
And Now An Update
by ShadowBanker
16 Jan 2012 at 8:01am
Hi All!
I have started a webcomic with two other people: And Now An Update. Fans of XKCD, PBF, SMBC and other acronyms should check it out. Comics are all done in MsPaint and in 10 minutes or less. It updates every MWF.
Here’s one to get your feet wet (they look bigger over there): The Grandfather Paradox
We also have a twitter and a facebook page.
Enjoy! Let us know what you think!
The Becker-Posner Blog
Welcome to the new Becker-Posner Blog, maintained by the University of Chicago Law School.
Wealth and Income Taxes on the Rich-Becker
by Gary Becker
29 Jan 2012 at 8:02pm
We are resuming our weekly entries. Sorry for any inconvenience we caused.
The Occupy Wall Street movement has not expressed clear goals, but it does want higher taxes on the ?rich?. President Obama agreed in his State of the Union address, and proposed that the rich-in his case, anyone with an annual income of at least $1 million- pay no less than 30% of their income in federal taxes. Others have proposed to add annual taxes on household wealth, in addition to taxes on income. The fact is that Obama?s tax goal is already being met by the complicated American tax code, while even a small wealth tax would discourage savings and create other problems.
According to a 2010 study by the Congressional Budget Office, the effective federal tax rate on the top 1 percent of households has already been about 30%. This might seem to be a misprint since very wealthy persons like Warren Buffet and Mitt Romney report that they pay only about 15% of their income in taxes. However, much of their incomes come from investments that are first taxed at the corporate tax rate of 35%, and then the after-corporate tax income is taxed again when paid out as corporate dividends, or when capital gains are realized.
According to the same CBO study, federal taxes on the middle classes comprise on average only about 15% of their incomes, This disparity in tax rates indicates that the American tax system is already quite progressive when corporate income taxes are combined with personal income and capital gains taxes. To be sure, it is inefficient to have such high tax rates on corporate incomes. Eliminating the corporate income tax, and then taxing personal incomes, capital gains, and dividends at the same rate would go a long way to both simplifying the tax code and to improving its efficiency.
Better still would be to scrap entirely the income tax, and substitute a consumption (i.e. sales or value added) tax instead (see the more extended discussion of a general consumption tax in my post on 8/29/11). Even if consumption of the poor were taxed at lower rates, the current bloated level of federal spending could be financed with a consumption tax on the great majority of households of no more than 25%. The effective tax rate does not have to be high because a generally flat consumption tax would be far more efficient, in particular, it would be more encouraging to investments, than the present complicated personal and corporate income tax system.
An income tax is an indirect tax on wealth because it lowers the value of the assets that produced the taxable income. Nevertheless, support has recently emerged for a direct tax on wealth to go along with taxes on incomes. Some forms of wealth are already directly taxed, such as property taxes levied by most local governments, and taxes on estates of deceased individuals. Henry George in his book Progress and Poverty (1879) made a famous proposal for a wealth tax in the form of a 100% tax on increases in the value of land. This single tax, he believed, could replace all other taxes. George argued that a land tax was a good tax because, so he claimed erroneously, the value of land did not depend on what landowners did, but rather depended only on forces like population growth that were beyond their control.
Current proposals for a wealth tax go beyond taxes on particular assets, like land or housing, and envisage a much broader tax that includes financial wealth, like stocks and bonds. I only say ?broader? since a viable wealth tax would still exclude wealth in the form of human capital, the most important form of capital in modern economies, and the source of wage and salary incomes. Since the richest one percent of households on average get about half their incomes from wages and salaries (the remaining 99% get almost all their income from human capital), much of the true wealth of the rich would escape a wealth tax.
Another major problem with even a small tax rate on wealth is that it implies a very high tax rate on savings. Consider a constant 2 percent tax on wealth, and suppose that a household saves $10,000 out of its income to raise its future wealth. A one year 5% return on these savings would increase its before tax wealth next period by $10,500. Since a 2 % wealth tax on $10,500 would leave an after-tax value of just $10, 290, such a wealth tax would reduce the after-tax return form 5% to only 3%, a 40% reduction.
So what seems like a small tax on wealth of only 2% is the equivalent of an income tax on savings of 40%. Presumably, this would discourage savings and increase consumption, whereas sustained higher long-term growth in GDP requires greater, not lesser, savings. As I mentioned earlier, the discouragement to savings of an income (or wealth) tax is a major reason why consumption taxes are better.
Wealth taxes have several other serious problems in addition to their negative effects on savings. It is almost impossible to value accurately many sources of tangible wealth, such as the value of privately owned businesses, so that an actual wealth tax would be rather narrow. Moreover, forms of wealth that can be most easily valued because they have good asset markets, such as stocks and bonds, can be moved across countries, and hidden through complex arrangements of assets.
Therefore, I conclude that a general tax on wealth is undesirable because it is both inefficient and ineffective. A feasible wealth tax is dominated by consumption taxes, including even progressive consumption taxes, and by inclusive income taxes.
EconomistMom.com
…because I’m an economist and a mom–that’s why!
The New CBO Report: Still a Best-Case Scenario After All These Years
by economistmom
31 Jan 2012 at 11:00am
The Congressional Budget Office’s new budget and economic outlook is out, and as usual, it really doesn’t seem all that bad when you look at their “baseline” numbers. (Deficits as a share of GDP over the next ten years are still at economically sustainable–less than the growth rate of the economy–levels.) Oh, except that the [...]
Marginal Revolution
Small steps toward a much better world.
A fragment to ponder
by Tyler Cowen
3 Feb 2012 at 10:47am
The RGDP growth rate has been 1.6% in the 4 quarters since late 2010, which is below everyone?s estimate of trend growth (except perhaps Tyler Cowen… There is much more at the link, from Scott Sumner. Of course Michael Mandel, Peter Thiel, Garry Kasparov, and some others would quality as well.
xkcd.com
xkcd.com: A webcomic of romance and math humor.
Baby Names
31 Jan 2012 at 10:00pm
Greg Mankiw’s Blog
Random Observations for Students of Economics
We’re number 1!
by noreply at blogger.com (Greg Mankiw)
31 Jan 2012 at 9:19am
Ec 10 is still the largest course at Harvard.
Freakonomics » Blog
The Hidden Side of Everything
Football Freakonomics: Tackling the Old Defense-Wins-Championship Cliche
by Stephen J. Dubner
3 Feb 2012 at 10:23am
We all know the cliché. Go ahead, put on your best John Facenda voice and say it with us:
DEFENSE. WINS. CHAMPIONSHIPS.
What?s that even supposed to mean? That defense is more important during the playoffs than the regular season? That defense is generally more important than the offense?
Or is the saying maybe the collective echo of some grizzled defensive coordinator in a long-ago championship game, trying to fire up his troops during halftime? ?Men, you and I know that our teammates on offense are good men, tough men, talented men. And they helped get us here. But let me be clear, gentlemen: DEFENSE WINS CHAMPIONSHIPS!?
What?s that even supposed to mean? That defense is more important during the playoffs than the regular season? That defense is generally more important than the offense?
Economix
Explaining the Science of Everyday Life
Comparing Recessions and Recoveries: Job Changes
by By CATHERINE RAMPELL
3 Feb 2012 at 11:14am
A look at how far the United States economy has to go before it fully recovers from the Great Recession.
Indexed
PUBLISHED WEEKDAY MORNINGS as the COFFEE BREWS. FOR MORE randomness GO TO jessicahagy.info
What are you raising awareness of today?
by Jessica Hagy
2 Feb 2012 at 11:58am
Share and Enjoy:
Slate Articles
Stories from Slate
NFL 2011
by Chris Brown
3 Feb 2012 at 3:12pm
Tom Brady is a fortunate guy. At this point in his career, a fourth Super Bowl win seems like cosmic overkill: He already has three championship rings, he?s a lock for the Hall of Fame, and he’s married to a supermodel who?s nearly a billionaire on her own. At the same time, it?s impossible not to admire his on-field ability. Brady has crafted himself into the perfect NFL quarterback?accurate, smart, and in complete control at all times. In an era when NFL defenses are more complicated than ever, Brady instantly processes the information thrown at him on every play?Who?s rushing me? Who?s dropping back? What coverage are they in??and translates it into action.
Nudge blog
From Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein’s “Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness”
Auto-suggest suggests how far behavioral economics has come, and how far it s…
by nudgeblog
24 Feb 2010 at 7:30pm
In terms of recognition and respect, behavioral economics has certainly come a long way in the last 25 years. But it is still a Hibernian outpost in the great Roman Economics empire. One of the newest metrics for evaluating its impact is the auto-suggest feature in many search engines that has become quite popular since [...]
Megan McArdle : The Atlantic
Atlantic content from Megan McArdle
Coffee Talk
by Megan McArdle
3 Feb 2012 at 6:30am
Why Your Prius Will Kill our Highways:
This isn’t a new problem, but it’s getting worse. Since back in the Eisenhower era, the federal government has maintained a Highway Trust Fund, paid for mostly by taxes on fuel, that helps cover the repair and construction of our country’s roads, bridges, and mass transit. The idea was that drivers themselves should bear some of the cost the roads they used. Unfortunately, Congress hasn’t raised the gas tax since 1993. Since then, inflation has eaten away at least a third of its value.Why my old neighborhood wants to kill chain drugstores:
“Each block has a Duane Reade,” said Kenneth Yoo, owner of Paper House, a party supplies store on Amsterdam near 73rd Street. “They try killing small business. All the stuff we have Duane Reade has, too — and cheaper.”
Dilbert Daily Strip
The Official Dilbert Daily Comic Strip RSS Feed
Comic for February 2, 2012
1 Feb 2012 at 11:00pm
Environmental Economics
Economists on Environmental and Natural Resources News, Opinion, Analysis
I tend to rank Resource and Energy Economics #1
by John Whitehead
2 Feb 2012 at 8:56am
Stephen Dubner:
We recently put out a podcast called ?The Truth Is Out There ? Isn?t It?? about how people decide what to believe about everything from global warming and nuclear risk to UFO?s. It was inspired by the research of Dan Kahan and his colleagues at the Cultural Cognition Project; they have found that we systematically filter our beliefs through our personal and political ideologies. In other words, we allow our biases to influence what we think about theoretically non-ideological issues, but we aren?t aware of that influence. …
If you are at all interested in these kind of bias stories, and especially if you care about the realm of academic economics, you?ll definitely want to look at a new paper by Christis Tombazos and Matthew Dobra, who looked for bias within their own field. The paper (PDF here) is called ?Using a Voting Mechanism to Evaluate the Quality of Research in Economics: Lessons from the Australian National Research Assessment? (emphasis added):
As part of the Australian National Research Assessment, the nation?s 133 most senior academic economists participated in a voting process that assigned quality ratings to almost a thousand journals of economics. The ratings were applied on the nation?s 975 academic economists? publications retroactively by a number of institutions for a variety of purposes. The government used them to rank Universities and to distribute research funds. And Universities used them in hiring decisions, and the determination of salaries and publication bonuses. This study investigates the determinants of voting decisions. We find that voters are influenced by objective measures of journal quality. However, we also find strong evidence that, other things equal, voters assign the highest possible quality rating to journals in which they have published. They also overstate the quality of journals to which they have special access while understating the quality of journals that fall primarily in the fields of expertise of their 842 non-voting colleagues, or in which these non-voting colleagues have published.
Planet Money
Planet Money
Who Killed Lard?
3 Feb 2012 at 3:33pm
Lard didn’t just fall out of favor. It was pushed. It was a casualty of a battle between giant business and corporate interests.
Ecocomics
Where Graphic Art Meets Dismal Science
Can Wolverine Build a School?
by ShadowBanker
17 Nov 2011 at 7:30am
Wolverine #17 by Jason Aaron and Ron GarneyMarvel Comics, 2011
Where does Wolverine get his money from? If he has managed to save up enough to start a new school for mutants in Westchester, he must certainly have exercised several lifetimes of prudent money management. Here is what we had to say about this before:
Throughout his long, long life Wolverine has shown very little interest in matters of an economic nature. He’s spent most of his time living in cabins, hovels, and sleeping in the beds and houses of others. His worldly possessions seldom exceed the clothes on his back (usually a jumpsuit made of spandex or leather), a cache of cheap cigars, a motorcycle, and a six-pack of beer. This is the sum of the worldly possessions he has accrued in over 100 years of life. Granted, a large part of this life was spent being mind controlled and experimented on, but in the years since he’s escaped from Weapon X, Wolverine has made a series of life decisions which placed him in financial jeopardy.
We know Wolverine likes to live a life of modesty. Previously, I thought this was due to the fact that, despite living the equivalent of several lifetimes, he never took a job that was lucrative enough for him to splurge on things like mansions and jets.
Evidently, this is incorrect. Turns out that Wolverine has been slowly saving for years and has now accrued enough funds to open a school.
I haven’t the fainted idea of what it costs to open a school. I doubt that the Xavier Institute was a charter school or received any sort of public funding. In today’s Marvel Universe, mutants are still highly stigmatized so it is unlikely that Wolverine will be able to receive any sort of grant or government assistance, unless through nefarious means (snikt snikt). I do, however, know that it is extremely expensive, probably requiring initial funding of upwards of $500,000 to one million dollars. Westchester County, New York, also seems like it would be particularly costly.
Is it possible that Wolverine managed to save up this much money? Actually, it doesn’t seem that crazy. Let’s assume all assets that he had saved up prior to his kidnapping by the Weapon X program had been wiped (it is unlikely that the sinister Canadian organization let him keep his money). Then, once Logan escapes the program (well after World War II), he had to start with nothing.
He then met Charlies Xavier and joined up with the X-Men in the 1970s. I think it’s safe to assume that he started his savings at this point. Assuming that he had been paid a salary for his service (something of which I am not sure, though I imagine he needed some form of income to, you know, eat) and that he served continuously through the present (a stretch, but it would be difficult to account for all the gaps in his time with the X-Men), it is certainly feasible that Wolverine had saved the amount required to at the very least put forth the initial funds. He had been actively working for four decades (longer if you count the time between Weapon X and the X-Men, where he was employed with Department K and probably earned some sweet government pay) and his expenses were minimal (for a while, he took up free residence at the X-Mansion and, as mentioned above, spends very little on material things).
Therefore, it would appear as though Wolverine’s modest lifestyle is evidence of prudence and thrift, rather than of having little assets.
Hell, Logan might even be part of the 1%.
The Becker-Posner Blog
Welcome to the new Becker-Posner Blog, maintained by the University of Chicago Law School.
Taxing Wealthy People More Heavily?Posner
by Richard Posner
29 Jan 2012 at 7:41pm
Inequality in income and wealth has grown very substantially in the United States in recent decades, and appears to be at a historical high. That would hardly be noticed, in a society such as ours that is strikingly free of envy, were it not for the last almost three and a half years of economic distress. The distress is not felt by the wealthy; this is noticed, and angers the nonwealthy, who are naturally inclined to think that the distress should be shared, and that increasing the progressivity of the tax system would be a step in that direction, and should be taken. Many people are worried by the nation?s huge public debt, and it is natural to think that raising taxes on the wealthy would reduce that debt by reducing the gap between government revenue and government spending. Furthermore, Federal Reserve and other regulatory officials, who I believe were (with a helping hand from many academic economists) primarily responsible for the economic distress because of unsound interest-rate and regulatory policies, and regulatory laxness, and general cluelessness, have managed to shift the blame, in the mind of the public, for the economic distress to the financial industry. Markets are Darwinian, and the industry?s reliance on short-term capital, both financial and human, compels risk taking to the farthest degree that the government will allow, and the Greenspan-Bernanke Fed and its staff and the entire financial regulatory establishment allowed too much risk taking. But this is not widely understood; the reappointment of Bernanke as Chairman of the Federal Reserve helped to conceal recognition of the point.
But as long as a substantial segment of the public blames the wealthy, the pressure for making the tax system more progressive presents a political as well as an economic issue. An increase in progressivity that does little economic harm would be a low-cost response to the political pressure, though the President?s recent proposal to tax people who earn more than $1 million at a rate that will make them pay 30 percent of their income in federal income tax carries symbolism too far. If a person who earns $1 million a year and is taxed at an effective rate of 25 percent is subjected to such an imposition, instead of paying $250,000 in taxes he will have to pay $300,000, and he will therefore do whatever it takes to reduce his income from $1 million to $999,999, as that will save him $49,999.
Marginal income tax rates can be increased slightly, deductions trimmed slightly, the budget of the Internal Revenue Service increased so that the tax laws are enforced more effectively, and income tax forms simplified, and the result of these modest measures would be a small increase in government revenues at a small?I would guess a negligible?cost in economic growth. Anything more ambitious in the way of tax reform probably is politically infeasible, given our disordered political system, and, more interesting, probably economically infeasible as well. While there are good theoretical arguments for replacing income with consumption taxes, as discussed by Becker, the administrative and transitional costs would be staggering; and so with any effort to overhaul the federal income tax system rather than just tinker at the edges of it.
Grandstand gestures like the proposed millionaire tax would have only the slighest effect in alleviating resentment at the rich, and should be understood as campaign documents rather than serious proposals.
As for a tax on wealth as distinct from income, I agree with Becker that it is an uncommonly silly idea. I would again stress issues of implementation, rather than theoretical objections (for example that the wealth tax would necessarily exclude human capital from taxable wealth, despite its importance). It would be an enormous undertaking to compel everyone in the United States (for one cannot identify who is wealthy by income alone, since one can have great wealth but a small income, depending on the form the wealth takes) to value his entire wealth honestly. Would everyone who owns a home have to submit an appraiser?s evaluation? And who would pick the appraiser?
EconomistMom.com
…because I’m an economist and a mom–that’s why!
Why Limiting Itemized Deductions (Still) Makes Sense
by economistmom
23 Jan 2012 at 6:58am
It’s a proposal that has come up over and over again in President Obama’s budget, and one that I hope will come up yet again. In my column in today’s Tax Notes (subscription-only access here), I remind readers that this is a great idea whose time has (been overdue to) come: the proposal to limit [...]
Marginal Revolution
Small steps toward a much better world.
The new jobs report
by Tyler Cowen
3 Feb 2012 at 7:19am
All good news, 243k up but lots more information in the numbers, try @JustinWolfers or @BetseyStevenson for details and interpretation. The “big loser” here?: Old Keynesianism. You really can get a recovery when the real shocks are moderately positive. You will note, as we have been told many many times by many many sources, fiscal [...]
xkcd.com
xkcd.com: A webcomic of romance and math humor.
Etymology-Man
29 Jan 2012 at 10:00pm
Greg Mankiw’s Blog
Random Observations for Students of Economics
Are federal government workers overpaid?
by noreply at blogger.com (Greg Mankiw)
30 Jan 2012 at 1:23pm
Yes, says CBO:
Differences in total compensation?the sum of wages and benefits?between federal and private-sector employees varied according to workers’ education level.
Federal civilian employees with no more than a high school education averaged 36 percent higher total compensation than similar private-sector employees. Federal workers whose education culminated in a bachelor’s degree averaged 15 percent higher total compensation than their private-sector counterparts. Federal employees with a professional degree or doctorate received 18 percent lower total compensation than their private-sector counterparts, on average. Overall, the federal government paid 16 percent more in total compensation than it would have if average compensation had been comparable with that in the private sector, after accounting for certain observable characteristics of workers.
Freakonomics » Blog
The Hidden Side of Everything
All Hail the Stand-Up Meeting!
by Stephen J. Dubner
3 Feb 2012 at 8:29am
I’m so pleased to see that stand-up meetings are gaining ground (or at least exposure, in the Wall Street Journal). I am on the record as someone who dislikes meetings in general; I also work much of the day standing up (at a great adjustable desk that Ikea unfortunately no longer makes).
As Rachel Silverman writes:
Stand-up meetings are part of a fast-moving tech culture in which sitting has become synonymous with sloth. The object is to eliminate long-winded confabs where participants pontificate, play Angry Birds on their cellphones or tune out. …
Economix
Explaining the Science of Everyday Life
Wow. But Is the Number Real?
by By FLOYD NORRIS
3 Feb 2012 at 8:13am
This is a recovery led by the private sector. And while seasonal adjustments may have made January look better than it really was, job growth appears strong.
Indexed
PUBLISHED WEEKDAY MORNINGS as the COFFEE BREWS. FOR MORE randomness GO TO jessicahagy.info
Why December birthdays are so lame.
by Jessica Hagy
1 Feb 2012 at 11:46am
Share and Enjoy:
Slate Articles
Stories from Slate
Freudian Slip
by Brian Palmer
3 Feb 2012 at 2:48pm
In his first Gawker column on Wednesday, an anonymous therapist discussed the challenges of dealing with physically deformed patients, described counseling a confessed rapist, and revealed some clients? troubling confessions. (One patient tried to sodomize his dog.) Although the patients weren?t named, some commenters wondered whether such disclosures are ethical. Can your shrink spill your secrets?
Nudge blog
From Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein’s “Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness”
Millionaire athletes hate handing over $20 cash for being late
by nudgeblog
23 Feb 2010 at 7:39pm
UCLA economist Matthew Kahn picks up on a neat little story about Los Angeles Lakers coach Phil Jackson’s use of psychology in his NBA locker rooms. Ever the behavioralist, Jackson fined his players tiny amounts – $10 and $20 – for being late to games by a few minutes. Jackson has found that players are [...]
Megan McArdle : The Atlantic
Atlantic content from Megan McArdle
Stop Fixating on the Administrative Overhead of Nonprofits
by Megan McArdle
2 Feb 2012 at 12:29pm
So naturally, posting on abortion has caused a swarm of very angry people from both sides to show up in my comments. A couple of them are demanding that I “educate myself” about “the facts” on Planned Parenthood and Susan G. Komen, such as the fact that only a minority of the procedures performed at Planned Parenthood are abortions, and that Susan G. Komen spends about 20% of their money on admin and fundraising.
I’m aware of the former, but thought it was obvious that people who don’t want to fund abortions probably don’t want to fund any abortions at all, much less the 330,000 abortions performed at Planned Parenthood annually–nay, not even if this represents only 3% of Planned Parenthood visits.
The latter is a silly and all-too-common complaint that desperately needs refuting.
To start with, Planned Parenthood spends about 16% of its annual budget on . . . overhead and fundraising. Now that they know, how many of the people who were angry about Komen’s overhead are going to also withdraw their support from Planned Parenthood? I suspect the number is zero, but I could be wrong.
But more broadly, the worry about charity overhead has gotten completely out of hand. I’ve heard from more than one frantic foundation fundraiser who can’t raise a dime for overhead–everyone wants their money earmarked for programs. None of the donors seem to realize that even at a very well run charity, the electric bill, accountants, IT staff, grantwriters, compliance experts, investment managers, and yes, fundraisers do not actually get paid by good fairies who drop off wee buckets o’ gold at the beginning of every month. Or that unless you have all those boring-yet necessary things, you cannot actually run any programs.
Now, of course, donors should make sure that the causes they support do not simply become sinecures for the people running them. But they should not wring their handkerchiefs when they discover that–whoda thunkit?–charities have to have offices and coffee makers just like all the places that donors work.
Nor is there one right level of overhead for an organization. A group that provides a lot of very expensive services might have a very low central overhead rate, while a group that has a heavy legal compliance burden, or has a large number of low-cost operations to coordinate, or has a small endowment which requires constant fundraising, might have high overhead. Maybe Susan G. Komen’s numbers are out-of-whack, but you can’t prove it by saying that 20 cents on every dollar go to overhead. You have to assess what they do, and how much that costs.
You certainly shouldn’t use those sorts of numbers as a political club. Unless you’re very, very sure that none of the groups you support put a lot of their money towards overhead.
Dilbert Daily Strip
The Official Dilbert Daily Comic Strip RSS Feed
Comic for February 1, 2012
31 Jan 2012 at 11:00pm
Environmental Economics
Economists on Environmental and Natural Resources News, Opinion, Analysis
It has been quite awhile since we had a good Christo post
by John Whitehead
2 Feb 2012 at 6:27am
“Over the River” vs “ROAR”:
The $50 million project by the artist Christo, who hopes to drape nearly six miles of the Arkansas River here in southern Colorado with suspended bank-to-bank fabric, received approval from federal land managers late last year. …
Christo?s supporters ? a strange bedfellow?s mix of art lovers, politicians and tourism interests ? rallied near the county administration building before the session began, handing out sky-blue T-shirts.
Anti-Christo forces, led by a group that has dubbed the project, and the name of their organization, ?Rags Over the Arkansas River,? or ROAR, said that moneyed interests and state politicians were pushing a project that would mostly benefit outsiders. …
The project, which is projected to draw upward of 400,000 visitors ? during the two-year construction period and the two-week final exhibition, tentatively scheduled for August 2014 ? has divided people over multiple fracture lines.
Some speakers at the hearing said they resented the pressure to say yes, which they said is bearing down on their small rural communities from local chambers of commerce and politicians, led by Gov. John W. Hickenlooper, a vocal enthusiast.
Others said the project, in seeking to create art in the midst of an already stunning natural setting in a rugged river valley, would diminish nature by presuming to improve upon it ? a prospect that would offend true lovers of Colorado?s wild beauty and keep them away. …
And in classifying an art project as a ?recreation activity,? the suit says, the federal analysts framed their assessment in ways that excused the impact of the thousands of bore-holes, rock-bolts and anchors that will have a cumulative effect, the suit says, not unlike industrial mining.
via www.nytimes.com
Wow, where to start? First, the costs of the project is $50 million plus the external “resource extraction costs.” But the $50 million is, apparently, covered by Christo’s art sales (really?). The benefits are the consumer surplus values enjoyed by the expected 400,000 visitors (wondering where that number came from …).
So, what we have here is a classic western lands problem, nature lovers vs art lovers, cast in unfamiliar terms for westerners, resource extraction costs vs outdoor recreation benefits. But, oddly, in this case the costs and benefits coincide with the same project instead of being competing projects (e.g., you can either mine it or build a mountain bike trail).
Planet Money
Planet Money
Jobs: Things Are Getting Better, Faster
3 Feb 2012 at 7:57am
In absolute terms, the job market is still bad. But the trend is very good.
Ecocomics
Where Graphic Art Meets Dismal Science
Disproportionate Response Man
by ShadowBanker
20 Oct 2011 at 9:37am
A great entry from Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal:
The Becker-Posner Blog
Welcome to the new Becker-Posner Blog, maintained by the University of Chicago Law School.
Notice
by Richard Posner
22 Dec 2011 at 7:50am
We will resume blogging after New Year’s day.
EconomistMom.com
…because I’m an economist and a mom–that’s why!
Ruth (Marcus): Romney Reforms More Ruthless Than (Even) Ryan?s
by economistmom
18 Jan 2012 at 11:21am
The Washington Post’s Ruth Marcus points out that if Mitt Romney really cares about the poor, he has a funny way of showing it–in this case, regarding his ideas for fiscal policy reforms: ?I?m concerned about the poor in this country,? Mitt Romney said the other day. ?We have to make sure the safety net is [...]
Marginal Revolution
Small steps toward a much better world.
Thomas Sargent on federal bailouts
by Tyler Cowen
3 Feb 2012 at 6:59am
In 1789, the political price for our federal constitution included a bailout of the 13 indebted states. But it was by refusing to bail out the states a second time in the 1840s that the United States preserved its federal system, with substantial fiscal independence for state governments. Facing a similar moment, Europe might learn [...]
xkcd.com
xkcd.com: A webcomic of romance and math humor.
Sigh
26 Jan 2012 at 10:00pm
Greg Mankiw’s Blog
Random Observations for Students of Economics
How much would a Buffett Tax raise?
by noreply at blogger.com (Greg Mankiw)
30 Jan 2012 at 10:27am
Robert Samuelson has the numbers:
Obama?s still-vague Buffett Tax would apparently impose a minimum 30 percent tax rate on incomes exceeding $1 million….In September, the Congressional Budget Office estimated the 10-year deficit at $8.5 trillion. The nonpartisan Tax Foundation estimates that a Buffett Tax might now raise $40 billion annually. Citizens for Tax Justice, a liberal group, estimates $50 billion. With economic growth, the 10-year total might optimistically be $600 billion to $700 billion. It would be a tiny help; that?s all.
Freakonomics » Blog
The Hidden Side of Everything
How to Get Your Kid to Do Chores
by Freakonomics
3 Feb 2012 at 7:43am
There’s a new iPad app for parents to incentivize children to do chores. HighScore House! sets up a market for parents and children to assign points to chores and exchange those points for rewards.
Co-founder Kyle Seaman tells us that they’ve tracked 150,000 tasks from about 6,000 users in their beta version (full version will launch in a couple months).
HighScore House! shared some data with us: 43 percent of their users are kids between 5 and 9 years old, with an average task completion rate of 54 percent. Girls have a 2 percent higher completion rate than boys. In general, kids seem to favor low-hanging fruit: lower value tasks (usually easier ones) have a higher completion rate.
Economix
Explaining the Science of Everyday Life
Health Care Payers Push Back Against Costs
by By UWE E. REINHARDT
3 Feb 2012 at 4:00am
The opacity surrounding prices and the practice of charging different buyers different prices for identical goods or services contribute mightily to the cost of health care, but at the least the former may be on the way out, an economist writes.