Asymptosis: Always Approaching

Category: Economics

  • Pubs and Economic Opportunity: Not

    I’ve blogged about this before, but I need to pass on another piece of proof, courtesy of Matthew Yglesias. Adopting one of the free-marketers’ favorite mantras: a good economic system allocates resources to create the greatest prosperity for all. (It’s a sum function.) That includes human resources: people’s talents are directed where they’re most effective…

  • Tea Partiers: Old, White, Rich, Educated Men

    That’s not the whole tea party, of course. But tea partiers skew strongly on each of these dimensions, according to a new NYT/CBS poll. I just think it’s worth pointing out that that group has benefited more than any other from the government policies that were put in place before their births and while they…

  • Do Experts Know Better?

    My friend Steve likes to proclaim the value of casual intuition — based on one’s day-to-day observations over the course of life — and downplay the value of expertise, analysis, and data in making good judgments. Among other things, he defends Sarah Palin and other less-thinkerly politicians on these grounds. He also points to Robert…

  • Change Your Goddam Voice Mail Message! (Pass It On)

    Starting today, your outgoing voice mail message should start (and quite possibly end) with: Hi this is [insert your name here]. Press [star or pound] to leave a message. I probably don’t have to explain why. But I will. 1. Everybody hates waiting through your message, and they really hate waiting through the instructions on…

  • Stockman: Was It Reagan’s Fault?

    I finally got around to reading (large chunks of) David Stockman’s book on the rise of Reaganomics. Having done so, I realize I could have learned everything I needed from the back cover: There’s only one thing I disagree with here: “…it had not been his fault. He had been misled by a crew of…

  • Incarceration and Unemployment: U.S. and Europe

    Ever since Bryan offered this bet on future unemployment rates in the U.S. and Europe, I’ve been wondering: how do incarceration rates affect those numbers? Europe has consistently higher unemployment than the U.S., but the U.S. has far and away the highest incarceration rate in the world — .75% of the population. (World Prison Population…

  • Is Altruism Inevitable?

    In one of those wonderful confluences, two items just came together for me. I read The Social Atom by Mark Buchanan, and my friend Steve posted a link to an Economist piece on evolution, fairness, markets, and religion. It all circulates around a central conundrum that evolutionists (including Darwin) have been worrying at since Darwin:…

  • Libertarians, Republicans, and Democrats: New Findings on Morality, Empathy, and Sympathy

    Will Wilkinson returns me to a subject of fascination to me — the different moral weightings employed by Republicans and Democrats — and points out new findings about the moral weightings of Libertarians. To recap a previous post on research by Jonathan Haidt, as recounted in an article by Steven Pinker: Republicans care equally about…

  • The Party of Prosperity? The Seven Reasons that Democrats’ Policies are More Economically Efficient

    Or: The Seven Habits of Highly Efficient Economies Republican economic policies are widely perceived (especially by Republicans) as being pro-growth and pro-prosperity, even though All. The. Evidence. Demonstrates. The. Opposite. (How dare they call themselves “conservatives”?) Even the rich get richer under Democrats — though not at the expense of the poor and the middle…

  • Robin Hanson’s Reply to the Luddites

    Update: I am an idiot. (You could have found that out by asking my daughters.) Curt Gardner is nice enough to point out in the comments that “the book you link to is not Robin Hansen’s, but that of his GMU colleague Tyler Cowen.” I do get the two confused at times, this being a…

  • Is Swiss Health Care a Good Model for Ours?

    While perusing Arnold Kling’s post for my previous, I came across the following, which simply cannot go unchallenged: …why not try single-payer in one part of the country and radical deregulation in another? Switzerland, which is about the size of Maryland, has different health care systems in each of its 20-odd cantons, which are about…

  • Want to Spread the Power? Spread the Wealth.

    You’re forever hearing Republicans and conservatives saying that they want to put decision-making–political power–in the hands of states and localities. This post by Arnold Kling is a good example out of thousands. The reasoning is not crazy (though it is contestable): Wisdom of the crowds. More people trying different policies results in succesful policies winning,…

  • ‘Pubs Love Catastrophic Coverage. Too Bad the Free Market Doesn’t Provide It

    Perhaps with very good reason, free-marketeers believe that catastrophic health coverage produces the best market efficiencies. People pay for everyday health care out of their own pockets, which gets them to shop for services and ask what the cost is, pushing costs down. They have an inexpensive insurance plan with a high deductible to cover…

  • Deficits Don’t Matter? The (Supposed) Experts Speak

    Dick Cheney famously said, “Reagan proved that deficits don’t matter.” I’ve argued elsewhere that this was a political, not an economic statement. People love to complain puritanically about debts and deficits, but they vote for politicians who promise to cut their taxes. Hence the 30-year hegemony of Reaganomics. But do deficits mattter (economically)? In particular,…

  • Pubs: You Had a Blank Piece of Paper for Eight Years

    Since you didn’t do anything, why should we think that you’ll do anything this time? Here’s the cost of doing nothing: In case tea-partiers are finding the arithmetic troubling, if we’d adopted the Clinton plan we’d currently be saving close to half a trillion dollars a year. If we’d adopted Nixon’s plan, we’d be saving…

  • Where Did the Deficit Come From? From “Conservatives,” of Course

    While poking around for info on the previous post, I came across this graphic: Which comes from this especially great WikiPedia page. Which just re-emphasizes what we’ve seen since WWII, and especially since 1980: Related posts: Largest Oil Spills Talking About Food Trends in Intergenerational Mobility: Declining Opportunity Since 1980 Galbraith Translates “Trickle Down”: Eat…

  • Okay, “Conservatives,” What Spending SHALL We Cut?

    Not surprisingly, somebody went out and asked them. Here are the results: Source. I think this pretty much speaks for itself, though it’s worth noting the commonly misunderstood fact that foreign aid accounts for less than 1% of Federal spending. Related posts: It’s Unanimous: Cut Spending! (As long as you don’t cut spending!) What’s Wrong…

  • “Out of Control Spending”? Not So Much

    A comment by flipspiceland on a previous post, about Democratic senators and “out of control” spending, got me curious about our spending numbers compared to other large, prosperous countries. Short story: our governments (fed, state, local) are incredibly frugal compared to the rest of the world. This even with a defense budget that’s larger than…

  • Democrats are Profligate Spendthrifts! Oh…Wait…

    Damn I’m busy today. I came across yet another great Wikipedia page that I really had to share: National debt by U.S. presidential terms. I’ll just share a little top-line data. There’s much more over there. Average Increase, 1978-2005 Spending Debt GDP Under Democratic Presidents 9.9% 4.2% 12.6% Under Republican Presidents 12.1% 36.4% 10.7% Who…

  • Galbraith Translates “Trickle Down”: Eat Shit

    In digging around for the previous post, I came across  this beaut on Wikipedia (can’t believe I’ve never seen it before), and just can’t resist sharing it: The economist John Kenneth Galbraith noted that supply side economics was not a new theory. He wrote, “Mr. David Stockman has said that supply-side economics was merely a…

  • David Stockman on Starving the Beast: “It doesn’t work. Game over.”

    You remember David Stockman, right? Reagan’s “whiz kid” budget director? He’s the man who engineered the last thirty years of Republican dominance by implementing The Reaganomics Strategy: borrow money from our children and from abroad to buy votes at home with the “I’ll cut your taxes” pander. Stockman has never been the type to twirl…