Category Archives: economics

Unexpected Correlations: Lead and Crime, Coffee and AIDS

Poverty reduction and AIDS reduction are not always, it would seem, the same thing.
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Bottled Water

I’m hoping that by the time China becomes the world’s dominant economic power, bottled water will be remembered as a 20th-Century curiosity, rather than a fact of life.
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The Economics of Book Publishing

If a book like Freakonomics can sell more copies by fudging the science, there’s a good chance that it will.
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New York State’s Mind-Boggling Economic Irrationality

I said
back in 2003 that New York behaves much like a dysfunctional Latin American
nation. Since then, most Latin nations have got their act together, certainly
in terms of fiscal policy. New York, meanwhile, has gotten precisely nowhere.
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Economists vs Political Scientists on the Web

Ezra Klein wants
to know
why economists are overrepresented in the blogosphere, while political
scientists are nowhere to be found.
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Why There Are So Many Frame Stores

Bryan Caplan has vacated the guest-blogger perch over at the Economist’s Free
Exchange blog, but he did leave his readers with an interesting puzzle
in microeconomics
, lifted from his
own blog
.
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Where Hits Come From

Chris
Dillow
and James
Surowiecki
both weigh in this week on the subject of where hits come from.
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Harvard-Yale Competition

Do Harvard and Yale compete for the best students? Greg Mankiw
certainly thinks
so
:
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Alternatives to Globalization

There are major downsides to globalization, but it increasingly seems as though fighting it is worse than futile: it’s actually counterproductive.
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Comparing Economies

New Amsterdam (a/k/a New York) is
indeed more similar to Old Amsterdam than it is to Amsterdam,
Missouri
(median household income: $29,821) or Amsterdam,
Ohio
(median household income: $24,583).
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Selling Stadium Seats

There’s nothing new about the plan to finance Yankee Stadium by the sale of seats.
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Monday Links Do The Twist

Enough links to keep anybody happy for at least an hour.
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Supply and Demand in the Cocaine Industry

There’s a large faction of economists who love to say that raising the minimum wage must also raise unemployment, because of the way that supply and demand curves work. I wonder what they would have to say about the cocaine situation.
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Paper of the Day: Levy and Temin on Income Inequality

Robert
Samuelson
devoted his column yesterday to a very interesting new paper from
Frank Levy and Peter Temin of MIT. For those
of us who prefer to read original papers rather than the journalism based on
them, the paper can be found here.
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Globalization Didn’t Bring Down US Prices After All

If inflation is “always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon,” then, as Ball puts it, “the accounting theory of inflation is always and everywhere a fallacy.”
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The Economics of Carbon Taxes

Mark
Thoma
has a good overview of the economics of the carbon tax vs cap-and-trade
debate.
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Where Does the US Economy Go From Here?

With the S&P 500 hitting all-time highs, I’m sanguine.
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Mohamed El-Erian Solves the Economics of Investing

What Makes Mohamed El-Erian a first-rate investor.
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Can Increased Demand Lead to Decreased Demand?

The ethics of eating skate.
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Stiglitz on DVD

Joe Stiglitz has an engaging and eminently watchable rhetorical style.
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Calculating the Cost of Emigrating

There aren’t costs of half a million dollars or so associated with moving to mainland US from Puerto Rico. It’s just something which a lot of Puerto Ricans have no interest in doing — and given how nice their beaches are, you can see why.
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Welcoming George Borjas to the Blogosphere

George Borjas starts a blog.
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Why Venezuela Won’t be the Next Zimbabwe

Venezuela is not Zimbabwe. Yes, Hugo Chavez is making very bad economic decisions — but then again, his elitist predecessors were hardly much better. And very bad economic decisions don’t in and of themselves lead to Zimbabwe-style disaster. For that, you need a power-mad lunatic like Robert Mugabe. And while Chavez might be distasteful to many Americans, a Mugabe he is not.
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Explaining the Dentist Puzzle

Why do some dentists get paid three times as much as others?
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What is Ben Stein Smoking?

Poor Brad DeLong has been beating
himself up
by reading Ben Stein again. I do have sympathy
with him: I was happily reading the newspaper myself yesterday, sipping on an
excellent cappuccino from Tarallucci
e Vino
, when the Stein
column
loomed up in front of me like some kind of car crash I couldn’t turn
away from.
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