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Items by Arnold Kling

EconLog

• What I'm Reading: 2

  Posted: September 6th, 2010, 3:24am PDT by Arnold Kling

  (September 6, 2010 10:24 AM, by Arnold Kling) Teach Like a Champion, by Doug Lemov. As a teacher, I find it helpful. However, with apologies to James C. Scott the book could have been entitled "Seeing like a teacher." An excerpt: the "plane" of your ...

• What I'm Reading: 1

  Posted: September 6th, 2010, 2:53am PDT by Arnold Kling

  (September 6, 2010 09:53 AM, by Arnold Kling) Boomergeddon, by James A. Bacon. He sent me a copy after he saw my piece on guessing the trigger point for a sovereign debt crisis. Years ago, I read Boomernomics by William Sterling. That book also raised ...

• Knowledge-Power Discrepancy

  Posted: September 6th, 2010, 1:42am PDT by Arnold Kling

  (September 6, 2010 08:42 AM, by Arnold Kling) I discuss knowledge and power with Russ Roberts. The central theme of Unchecked and Unbalanced is that we live an a world with increasingly important dispersed knowledge and yet in a structural sense power is becoming more ...

• Government in the Mortgage Business

  Posted: September 5th, 2010, 4:17am PDT by Arnold Kling

  (September 5, 2010 11:17 AM, by Arnold Kling) The New York Times reports, "This is subprime lending done right," said John Taylor, president of the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, an umbrella group for 600 community organizations, and a staunch critic of the lending industry. He ...

• Government in the Mortgage Business

  Posted: September 5th, 2010, 4:17am PDT by Arnold Kling

  (September 5, 2010 11:17 AM, by Arnold Kling) The New York Times reports, "This is subprime lending done right," said John Taylor, president of the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, an umbrella group for 600 community organizations, and a staunch critic of the lending industry. He ...

• Stop Calling it the Retirement Age

  Posted: September 5th, 2010, 3:58am PDT by Arnold Kling

  (September 5, 2010 10:58 AM, by Arnold Kling) Ezra Klein writes, there is one thing that both parties increasingly seem to agree on: You should work longer. Klein's thinking is that people do not want to work longer, so raising the Social Security "retirement age" ...

• Mandatory Bad Customer Service

  Posted: September 4th, 2010, 2:18pm PDT by Arnold Kling

  (September 4, 2010 09:18 PM, by Arnold Kling) Uwe E. Reinhart writes, The recently passed Affordable Care Act requires heath insurance issuers to use at least some minimum fraction of revenue from the premiums it receives on medical services. While the idea might sound straightforward, ...

• Payroll Tax Holiday and the Trust Funds

  Posted: September 3rd, 2010, 8:10am PDT by Arnold Kling

  (September 3, 2010 03:10 PM, by Arnold Kling) Megan McArdle writes, Politically, this has one major drawback: it's going to put huge holes in the Social Security and Medicare trust funds. Since I think those trust funds are meaningless accounting devices, I don't think this ...

• Mortgage Credit and the Housing Bubble

  Posted: September 3rd, 2010, 2:46am PDT by Arnold Kling

  (September 3, 2010 09:46 AM, by Arnold Kling) Adam J. Levitin and Susan M. Wachter write, the bubble was a supply-side phenomenon, attributable to an excess of mispriced mortgage finance: mortgage finance spreads declined and volume increased, even as risk increased, a confluence attributable only ...

• Technocratic Fundamentalism

  Posted: September 3rd, 2010, 1:49am PDT by Arnold Kling

  (September 3, 2010 08:49 AM, by Arnold Kling) Barry Eichengreen writes, Those root causes were an ideology of market fundamentalism and the policies flowing from it. The idea that markets get it right and governments only get in the way, what I refer to here ...

• Bond Bubble Watch

  Posted: September 2nd, 2010, 11:40am PDT by Arnold Kling

  (September 2, 2010 06:40 PM, by Arnold Kling) Jonathan D. Ostry, Atish R. Ghosh, Jun I. Kim, and Mahvash S. Qureshi write, at 5 percent of GDP below the debt limit, the government should be able to borrow at the risk-free rate; but as debt ...

• If I Taught Greg Mankiw's Seminar

  Posted: September 2nd, 2010, 3:54am PDT by Arnold Kling

  (September 2, 2010 10:54 AM, by Arnold Kling) His list of books for a freshman seminar in economics includes a diverse selection, including Bryan's Myth of the Rational Voter, which is the only one that I would duplicate. Offhand, I would pick 1. Jerry Muller, ...

• Unchecked and Unbalanced Watch

  Posted: September 2nd, 2010, 3:32am PDT by Arnold Kling

  (September 2, 2010 10:32 AM, by Arnold Kling) Pete Peterson writes, the Los Angeles City Council is expected to overturn the 36-year-old policy of city-funded sidewalk repair, returning responsibility to property owners. The city is attempting to narrow a nearly half-billion-dollar budget gap. The sidewalk ...

• Is the Taylor Rule Really a Rule?

  Posted: September 2nd, 2010, 12:14am PDT by Arnold Kling

  (September 2, 2010 07:14 AM, by Arnold Kling) John Taylor writes, The Taylor rule says that the federal funds rate should equal 1.5 times the inflation rate plus .5 times the GDP gap plus 1. Currently the inflation rate is about 1.5 percent and the ...

• Lawrence Lindsey Vs. Christy Romer

  Posted: September 1st, 2010, 11:33pm PDT by Arnold Kling

  (September 2, 2010 06:33 AM, by Arnold Kling) She says, by June, before the Recovery Act could have had much of an impact, it was 9½ percent. That is, our projection turned out to be wrong even before the Recovery Act had a chance to ...

• Oil Bubble Talk is Back

  Posted: September 1st, 2010, 4:04pm PDT by Arnold Kling

  (September 1, 2010 11:04 PM, by Arnold Kling) CNBC quotes Peter Beutel, I honestly think that if there were no investors using oil as an asset that the price of oil right now would be $10 or $15 or $18, but it wouldn't be anywhere ...

• Thomas Sargent, Master Macroeconomist

  Posted: September 1st, 2010, 12:33pm PDT by Arnold Kling

  (September 1, 2010 07:33 PM, by Arnold Kling) In an interview, he says, the more dynamic, uncertain and ambiguous is the economic environment that you seek to model, the more you are going to have to roll up your sleeves, and learn and use some ...

• Exchanging Nickels for Dimes?

  Posted: August 31st, 2010, 1:16pm PDT by Arnold Kling

  (August 31, 2010 08:16 PM, by Arnold Kling) James Hamilton writes, Suppose that the Federal Reserve were to sell off all its Treasury securities of less than one-year maturity, and use the proceeds to buy up all the longer term Treasury debt it could. For ...

• The Desire to See Others Suffer

  Posted: August 31st, 2010, 2:27am PDT by Arnold Kling

  (August 31, 2010 09:27 AM, by Arnold Kling) James Lewis argues that fascism involves the political use of sadism to recruit millions of followers in a campaign of pleasurable punishment against a scapegoated person or group. I found the essay provocative, which is a term ...

• Inflation Regimes: the 5.5 percent barrier

  Posted: August 30th, 2010, 11:44pm PDT by Arnold Kling

  (August 31, 2010 06:44 AM, by Arnold Kling) As Bryan offers data for study, let me suggest that in the United States the regime changes somewhere between 5.0 and 6.0 percent for the annualized "core" inflation rate (the CPI excluding food and energy). 1. Take ...

• The Unemployment Problem

  Posted: August 30th, 2010, 7:53am PDT by Arnold Kling

  (August 30, 2010 02:53 PM, by Arnold Kling) Megan McArdle writes, How much unemployment reduction you get for a given amount of stimulus spending is, obviously, at best an imperfect estimation. But let's take the CBO's estimates as representing a rough consensus of those who ...

• Dodd-Frank-Enron

  Posted: August 30th, 2010, 6:04am PDT by Arnold Kling

  (August 30, 2010 01:04 PM, by Arnold Kling) Peter Wallison writes, The dominant theme of the 2,300-page Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act is fear of instability and change...Where [non-bank] financial firms once focused on beating their competitors, they will now focus on ...

• Russ Roberts and Dan Pink

  Posted: August 30th, 2010, 3:31am PDT by Arnold Kling

  (August 30, 2010 10:31 AM, by Arnold Kling) They discuss motivation and incentives. Very enjoyable conversation. If anything, it is a little too fast-paced. One point is that people seek autonomy, mastery, and purpose. I think that is very true in people's avocations, or hobbies. ...

• Bond Bubble Watch

  Posted: August 30th, 2010, 2:56am PDT by Arnold Kling

  (August 30, 2010 09:56 AM, by Arnold Kling) Nobel Laureate Gary Becker comments on the possibility of a debt crisis. Morgan Stanley's report argues debt/GDP is not a good measure of default risk, and suggests instead the ratio of debt to government revenues. On this ...

• How Toggling Works (I Think)

  Posted: August 29th, 2010, 3:42pm PDT by Arnold Kling

  (August 29, 2010 10:42 PM, by Arnold Kling) Bryan asks how I think that the Fed can make big changes in inflation regime but not make small changes within a regime. Again, my thinking is based almost entirely on my reading of postwar U.S. monetary ...