faulker020

How much of the responsibility for understanding lies with the writer of an article, and how much with the reader? This is not an easy question to answer. Obviously both sides bear some responsibility. There are articles so baroque and circuitous that to get the point would require an unreasonable amount of time and effort to parse, even for the smartest reader. And there are readers who skim articles so lazily that even the simplest and most clearly written points are lost. Most cases fall somewhere in between. And the fact that writers don't usually get to write their headlines complicates the issue. See what you think about this one. The other day, Susan Dynarski wrote an op-ed in the New York Times criticizing school vouchers (a subject I've written about myself ). Dynarski opens with the observation that economists are generally less supportive of vouchers than they are of most free-market policies: You might think that most economists agree with this overall approach, be...

The Fundamental Fallacy of Pop Economics (which I get to name, because this is my blog and I can do whatever I want, mwahahaha) is the idea that the President controls economic outcomes . The Fundamental Fallacy is in operation every time you hear a phrase like "the Bush boom" or "the Obama recovery". It's in effect every time someone asks " how many jobs Obama has created ". It's present every time you see charts of economic activity divided up by presidential administration. For example, here's a chart from Salon writer Sean McElwee , using data from a paper by Alan Blinder and Mark Watson : Blinder and Watson attribute the difference to "shocks to oil prices, total factor productivity, European growth, and consumer expectations of future economic conditions", but McElwee attributes it to progressive economic policy. Larry Bartels has made headlines with similar analyses about inequality: But the worst perpetrators of this fallacy...

Lots of people are freaking out about the " post-truth world " and the " war on science ". People are blaming Trump, but I think Trump is just a symptom.  For one thing, rising distrust of science long predates the current political climate; conservative rejection of climate science is a decades-old phenomenon. It's natural for people to want to disbelieve scientific results that would lead to them making less money. And there's always a tribal element to the arguments over how to use scientific results; conservatives accurately perceive that people who hate capitalism tend to over-emphasize scientific results that imply capitalism is fundamentally destructive. But I think things are worse now than before. The right's distrust of science has reached knee-jerk levels. And on the left, more seem willing to embrace things like anti-vax, and to be overly skeptical of scientific results saying GMOs are safe.  Why is this happening? Well, tribalism has gotten...

"What will the apocalypse look like? The answer, to use a term generally understood but the specifics of which you cannot imagine, and which this document will attempt to describe, is 'warfare'." - William Bell, Fringe I've been wondering whether Twitter is a true dystopian technology. Meaning, a technology that makes each user better off, but makes the world worse off as a whole.  Note that you don't need a dystopian technology to create a dystopia. Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, and plenty of others managed to create dystopias using much the same technologies used in much happier, freer places. The question is whether some technologies, merely by existing, push the world toward a bad equilibrium. How could a technology that's good for each individual be bad for the world? Externalities . For example, suppose that the only fuel we had was so horribly polluting that it would destroy the planet if we used it for even just a few decades. But each individual'...

I've received many good responses to my post about the "Econ 101" (undifferentiated competitive partial equilibrium short run) theory of labor markets. But there are a couple responses that I got many times, which I think are worth discussing in detail. To recap: I pointed out that the Econ 101 theory can't simultaneously reconcile the small sizes of the labor market responses to immigration shocks and minimum wage increases. I said this implies that the Econ 101 theory isn't a good way to think about labor markets, and that instead we should pick another go-to mental model - general equilibrium, or search and matching theory, or monopsony, etc. Two common responses I got were: 1. "Immigration doesn't just shift labor supply; it shifts labor demand too." 2. "Labor is probably very heterogeneous, so one S-D graph shouldn't have to fit both these facts at once." The first response is a very good one. I like it a lot. What it means is tha...

What does it mean to "falsify" a theory? Well, you can't falsify a theory globally - even if it's shown to be false under some conditions, it might hold true far away or in the future. And almost every theory is falsifiable to some degree of precision, since almost every theory is just an approximation of reality. What falsification really means - or should mean, anyway - is that a theory is shown to not work as well as we'd like it to under a well-known set of conditions. So since people have different expectations for a theory - some demand that theories work with high degrees of quantitative precision, while others only want them to be loose qualitative guides - whether a theory has been falsified will often be a matter of opinion. But there are some pretty clear-cut cases. One of them is the "Econ 101" theory of the labor market. This is a model we all know very well - it has one labor supply curve and one labor demand curve, one undifferentiated typ...