Asymptosis: Always Approaching

Month: February 2011

  • Christina Romer Gets It Right. Mostly.

    I’ve been highly skeptical of Christina Romer’s thinking since she came out with that egregiously poorly-reasoned paper (PDF) that got so much play a couple of years ago. But her NYT “Economic View” piece today seems cogent, lucid, and well-supported to me. Basically: the emperors of theory-driven, sky-is-falling inflation hysteria are not wearing any clothing.…

  • “Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen.”

    –Attributed to Albert Einstein. I’d extend it to the early twenties, but otherwise, yeah. Related posts: Alex Tabarrok Does the Arithmetic on CDOs We Knew That Already The Economist’s New Gilded Age One Thousand Words on Prosperity Growth Does Inequality Result in Prosperity?

  • Ah: The Republicans Banned Earmarks!

    How Budget Battles Go Without the Earmarks – NYTimes.com. This good news. But it’s badly reported good news. Misrepresentative, and more importantly, it’s not a good explanation of what happened, which is the basic purpose of news reporting. Here’s the letter I wrote to the reporter: Re: “The wall finally tumbled down this year when…

  • What’s Wrong with this Picture?

    Public-sector collective bargaining is unhealthy and distorts democracy because it enables workers to influence the government which negotiates with them; but Unlimited and secret corporate political campaign contributions are necessary to democracy because they enable corporations to influence the government which regulates them. And I would add, “that negotiates with them over what those regulations should be.” via New…

  • “one of the most elemental human rights–the right to belong to a free trade union”

    Now who do you think said that? And when? http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=43110 Related posts: Largest Oil Spills You Gotta Give Reagan Credit Politicians Should Resist Equality and Prosperity! No, the Greeks Aren’t Lazy. The Germans Are. Reveal Your Preferences! Show Your Support for Accounting-Based Economic Modeling

  • Do Unions Kill Prosperity?

    You hear from lots of people — including lots of economists — that they do. Because they’re monopolistic price-fixers, they distort economic decisions and make us all worse off. The theory makes sense, as far as it goes. But if it were really true you’d expect to see it in the data. Not so much:…

  • Do We Need More Doctors?

    Since the rapidly rising cost of health care services is basically the only thing that matters in the whole government budget discussion, I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately. One frequent assertion is that the limited supply of doctors (because of semi-monopolistic medical-school, licensing, and immigration policies) is a big contributing factor. So when…

  • Embarrassed Republicans Admit They’ve Been Thinking Of Eisenhower Whole Time They’ve Been Praising Reagan

    “When I heard about Eisenhower’s presidential accomplishments–holding down the national debt, keeping inflation in check, and fighting for balanced budgets–it hit me that we’d clearly gotten their names mixed up at some point,” Priebus told reporters. “I couldn’t believe we’d been associating terms like ‘visionary,’ ‘principled,’ and ‘bold’ with President Reagan. That wasn’t him at…

  • The Best Line of the Week…

    Is actually from thirty years ago. Speaking of Social Security: “It’s not the third rail,” cautioned Ken Khachigian, a speechwriter for Reagan, “until you touch it.” 30 years of deficit talk, but little to show for it | Deseret News/New York Times News Service Related posts: Mea Culpa: Rivlin-Domenici Needs Work Who’s Fiscally Responsible? Koch…

  • Talking About Food

    Poking around for the previous post, I came across this lovely bit, which the Question of Wine blog has been nice enough to quote from the movie The Supper. Napoleon 1er’s ministers. Fouche and Talleyrand. It is the end of the dinner and Talleyrand serves a nice glass of Cognac to Fouche, who drinks the…

  • Fetishizing Food and Sex: Libs and Cons

    A propos of B. R. Myers’ takedown of moralizing, self-satisfied, holier-than-thou foodies and food writing in The Atlantic: It’s been said that liberals fetishize food the way conservatives fetishize sex. But I realize there’s a difference: for conservatives, out-of-wedlock sex is bad. For libs, bad food is bad (especially — but not only — when…

  • Just Cause I Thought This Was Hilarious — For Multiple Reasons

    From Steven Jay Gould’s The Flamingo’s Smile: A hungry female black widow spider is also a formidable eating machine, and courting males must exercise great circumspection. On entering a female’s web, the male taps and tweaks some of her silk lines. If the female charges. the male either beats a hasty retreat or sails quickly…

  • Is This Person Liberal or Conservative? In One Question.

    The OK Trends blog on the OK Cupid dating site is pretty amazing. They pull all their hundreds of millions of pieces of data and suss out amazing facts about how people are, and how they interact. Here’s a beaut re: politics and ideology (Jonathan Haidt, take note): The Best Questions For A First Date…

  • Say it Ain’t So!

    Hands over ears, eyes closed, humming loudly. (Hey, it always works for me.) During a private commission meeting last week, all four Republicans voted in favor of banning the phrases “Wall Street” and “shadow banking” and the words “interconnection” and “deregulation” from the panels final report, according to a person familiar with the matter and…

  • Government Investment and the Post-70s Prosperity Gap

    Does this look like a smoking gun to you? To me, at least, it looks like a very likely contributor to the stagnation of prosperity growth that we’ve seen since the 70s. This is fed, state, local spending combined. I’ve cut off the top and bottom to concentrate on the post-war period, and because earlier…

  • “No significant deregulation of financial institutions occurred in the last 30 years”

    This from a dissenting view (PDF) to the Report of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, by Peter Wallison — a fellow of the (wait for it…) American Enterprise Institute. The depths of Republican self-delusion continue to be nothing short of breathtaking, even awe-inspiring in their magnificence. Related posts: What Caused The Great Recession? The Economist…

  • What Caused The Great Recession? The Economist Sez: Too Much Money

    As in, money, a.k.a. “liquidity.” This in their review of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Report: Postmortems on the financial crisis: The official verdict | The Economist. A criticism of three of the refuseniks–that the report fails to take proper account of the weight of global capital seeking returns by investing in American mortgages–is absolutely fair. Ask…

  • You Gotta Give Reagan Credit

    He delivered faster growth than any other Republican president. But then again… A Few Graphs Describing the Reagan Presidency | Angry Bear. Related posts: It’s a Spending Problem, Right? The Reagan Revolution, In One Graph Now (Also) Blogging at Angry Bear Repeat After Me: Low Taxes (on Rich People) and Economic Growth Are Not Correlated…

  • The Most Depressing Graph I’ve Seen in a While

    Not because it shows us how bad things are. Because it shows us how little we know about how good or bad things are. What’s a 1975 dollar worth today? Either $3.40 or $4.21, depending on who you ask. That’s a 24% difference. Every inflation-adjusted analysis you see depends on one of these price deflators,…

  • It’s Unanimous: Cut Spending! (As long as you don’t cut spending!)

    Voter Ignorance Threatens Deficit Reduction. By Bruce Bartlett. A Feb. 1, 2011, YouGov poll found only one program, culture and the arts, on which a majority of people are willing to spend less… A Jan. 26, 2011, Gallup poll found 59 percent of people favoring cuts to foreign aid, but a majority opposed cutting any other programs……

  • It’s Not the Innovation, It’s the Distribution. Lane Kenworthy on Tyler Cowen

    Lane Kenworthy has provided the best response that I’ve yet seen to Tyler Cowen’s assertion that median family income growth has declined over recent decades because of a decline in innovation. The great decoupling « Consider the Evidence. Here’s the key graphic (red arrows mine): Lane points out: 2007 $s ’47-’73 ’73-’07 Annual Percentage Increase…