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My five favorite books of 2014
image source Here are 2013 and 2012. As usual I will limit myself to books that were published somewhat recently. My favorites, in no order: 1. Dam Nation, Stephen Grace (2012). This book is truly...
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Feynman on living standards
I started to say that the idea of distributing everything evenly is based on a theory that there's only X amount of stuff in the world. . . . But this theory doesn't take into account the real reason...
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Tabarrok on business dynamism
Last week's Cato growth forum included a session on declining business dynamism, which included presentations by John Haltiwanger, Amar Bhide, and Alex Tabarrok. Alex focused on the question of whether...
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Pledgeable Vanguard accounts
When I see houses, I see collateral. It's good for regular people to have access to some good collateral. Without good collateral, it's very costly to respond to income shocks, emergency spending...
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Depreciation
All things on earth only exist in different stages of becoming garbage. This is from Jerry Seinfeld, full routine below.
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Smith on non-expert macro opinion
Noah Smith, responding to a post by Scott Sumner, suggests three reasons that non-economists are so fond of confidently entering the macro debate. They are (1) macro's relevance to regular people, (2)...
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The early retirement movement
Many times on Twitter I have revealed that I am a huge fan of Mr. Money Mustache, profiled here and a million other places. For the unfamiliar, MMM is part of a movement ("early retirement extreme," or...
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Articulating my confusion: Shareholders vs. the real economy
Here's an article by Lydia DePillis based on a study by J.W. Mason. Excerpt: The years since the recession have given firms even more of an incentive to dispense cash rather than invest in growth: The...
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Straightening deck chairs during the "retirement crisis"
Here's Eduardo Porter: On average, a typical working family in the anteroom of retirement — headed by somebody 55 to 64 years old — has only about $104,000 in retirement savings, according to the...
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Isaac Brock on research and teaching in economics
Well, he might actually be talking about songwriting, but it seems to apply reasonably well: The method is this: Small ideas? Don’t hone in on them too much. If they seem too specific, too dead on, if...
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Straw man "economists"
"If Economists were Right, You Would Have a Raise by Now" is the title of an article by Peter Gosselin and Jennifer Oldham. I gather from the address bar that a previous title may have been "Your...
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How should we study the economy?
Schumpeter's approach: We shall proceed as the physical sciences do in those cases in which it is impossible actually to isolate a phenomenon by producing it in a laboratory: from our historic and...
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Establishments ≠ Firms (guest post)
By Ian Hathaway I recently read a paper that took an innovative approach to at least partially answer a question that is boggling the minds of many economists and other observers: why has the firm...
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Public earnings buying private firms
A few weeks ago there was a story that caught my interest, and I'm just now getting time to blog about it. The amazingly entertaining and informative Matt Levine pointed us to the NYT story: Big money...
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The Starks are dumb, and other thoughts
The great Jim Tankersley has an article arguing that people should learn from A Song of Ice and Fire when thinking about the business cycle. It includes a quote from your humble savings scold. I want...
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Thinking about family firms
The Economist has a really nice special report on family firms in the April 18th issue. I think this is a fascinating topic. I don't know the literature on this well, but I'd like to. Here's a...
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BED: 7.2 million jobs created, 6.6 million destroyed in Q3 2014
From the BLS: From June 2014 to September 2014, gross job gains from opening and expanding private sector establishments were 7.2 million, a decrease of 259,000 jobs from the previous quarter, the U.S....
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Why manufacturing?
From Dietz Vollrath: One of my continuing questions about research in economic growth is why it insists on remaining so focused on manufacturing to the exclusion of the other 70-95% of economic...
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Mobilizing and upgrading idle, depreciated capital
Here's a Bloomberg article: Real estate buyers seeking money to renovate and flip U.S. houses are getting help from some of the world’s biggest investment firms. Colony Capital Inc., Blackstone Group...
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Beating dead horses
The econ twittersphere has erupted in response to a provocative (but very blog-like) essay by the great Paul Romer, published in the Papers & Proceedings at AER. Romer is annoyed that certain old...
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Dire predictions about firm failure
John Chambers made a prediction that CBS News journalists find really noteworthy: In one of his last appearances as Cisco (CSCO) CEO, John Chambers offered a stark view of the future for many...
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Theory and empirics in cancer research
A couple years ago I read The Emperor of All Maladies, a fantastic book on the history of cancer research and treatment. I think a lot of economists would like this book because, among other things, it...
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And now for something completely different
My brother and I installed some pavers for my parents a couple weeks ago. In the past I've had a lot of floor installation jobs, but I've never done pavers. It's not too hard. Most of the work is...
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Business opinion and the representative firm
Here's Paul Krugman: Business leaders often give remarkably bad economic advice. . . . Success in business does not seem to convey any special insight into economic policy. . . . National economic...
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BED: 6.9 million jobs created, 6.5 million destroyed in Q1 2014
This is not a great report. From the BLS: From December 2013 to March 2014, gross job gains from opening and expanding private sector establishments were 6.9 million, a decrease of 440,000 jobs from...
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