faulker020

There's a particular style of argument that some conservative economists use to dismiss calls for government intervention in markets: Step 1: Either assert or assume that free markets work best in general. Step 2: List the reasons why this particular market might be unusual. Step 3: Dismiss each reason with a combination of skeptical harumphing, handwaving, anecdotes, and/or informal evidence. Step 4: Conclude that this market should be free from government intervention. In a recent rebuttal to a Greg Mankiw column on health care policy, John Cochrane displays this argumentation style in near-perfect form. It is a master class in harrumphing conservative prior-stating, delivered in the ancient traditional style. Young grasshoppers, take note. Mankiw's article was basically a rundown of reasons that health care shouldn't be considered like a normal market. He covers externalities, adverse selection, incomplete information, unusually high idiosyncratic risk, and behavioral...

On Twitter, I wrote that I disagreed with Brad's ideas about speech on college campuses . Brad then requested that I write my ideas up in the form of a DeLong Smackdown. So here we go. Brad's post was written in a particular context - the recent battles over right-wing speakers at Berkeley. More generally, the alt-right has been trying to provoke conflict at Berkeley, seeing an opportunity to gain nationwide sympathy. The murder of Heather Heyer  by Nazis, and general white supremacist street violence, has turned the national mood against the alt-right. The alt-righters see (correctly) that the only way to recover rough parity is the "both sides" defense - in other words, to get people so worried about left-wing street violence that they equivocate between left and right. To this end, they are trying to stir up the most obvious source of potential leftist street violence: Berkeley. Brad, who works at Berkeley, is far closer to the action, and knows far more about t...

I recently wrote a fairly well-received Twitter thread about how the cyberpunk sci-fi of the 1980s and early 1990s accurately predicted a lot about our current world. Our modern society is totally wired and connected, but also totally unequal - "the future is here, it's just not evenly distributed", as Gibson was fond of saying. Hackers, cyberwarfare, and online psyops are a regular part of our political and economic life. Billionaires build spaceships and collaborate with the government to spy on the populace, while working-class people live out of shipping crates and drink poison water. Hobbyists are into body modifications and genetic engineering, while labs are researching artificial body parts and brain-computer interfaces. The jetpack is real, but there's only one of it, and it's owned by a rich guy. Artificial intelligences trade stocks and can beat humans at Go, deaf people can hear, libertarians and criminals funnel billions of dollars around the world w...

Every so often, I see a news story or tweet hyping the fact that a modest but non-negligible percent of Americans said some crazy or horrible thing in a survey. Here are two examples: 1. " A chilling study shows how hostile college students are toward free speech " The most chilling findings, however, involved how students think repugnant speech should be dealt with...It gets even worse. Respondents were also asked if it would be acceptable for a student group to use violence to prevent that same controversial speaker from talking. Here, 19 percent said yes.  Update: It turns out this particular survey was a badly designed piece of crap . I'm not particularly surprised... 2. " Millennials are just about as racist as their parents " Racial slurs that have cropped up chants, e-mails and white boards on America's college campuses have some people worried about whether the nation's diverse and fawned-over millennial generation is not as racially tolerant as ...

I recently had the pleasure of appearing on the a16z podcast (a16z stands for Andreessen Horowitz, the venture capital firm). The topic was free trade, and the other guest was Russ Roberts of EconTalk. Russ is known for making the orthodox case for free trade , and I've expressed some skepticism and reservations, so it seemed to me that my role in this podcast was to be the trade skeptic. So I thought of three reasons why pure, simple free trade might not be the optimal approach. Reason 1: Cheap labor as a substitute for automation Getting companies and inventors to innovate is really, really hard. Basically, no one ever captures the full monetary benefit of their innovations, so society relies on a series of kludges and awkward second-best solutions to incentivize innovative activity. One of the ideas that has always fascinated me is the notion that cheap labor reduces the incentive for labor-saving innovation. This is the Robert Allen theory of the Industrial Revolution - high ...

Via Tyler Cowen , I see that Ljungqvist and Sargent have a new paper synthesizing much of the work that's been done in labor search-and-matching theory over the past decade or so. This is pretty cool (and not just because these guys are still doing important research at an advanced age). Basically, Ljungqvist and Sargent are trying to solve the Shimer Puzzle - the fact that in classic labor search models of the business cycle, productivity shocks aren't big enough to generate the kind of employment fluctuations we see in actual business cycles. A number of theorists have proposed resolutions to this puzzle - i.e., ways to get realistic-sized productivity shocks to generate realistic-sized unemployment cycles. Ljungqvist and Sargent look at these and realize that they're basically all doing the same thing - reducing the value of a job match to the employer, so that small productivity shocks are more easily able to stop the matches from happening: The next time you see unem...

In a recent essay about the racial politics of the Trump movement, Ta-Nehisi Coates concluded with a warning: It has long been an axiom among certain black writers and thinkers that while whiteness endangers the bodies of black people in the immediate sense, the larger threat is to white people themselves, the shared country, and even the whole world. There is an impulse to blanch at this sort of grandiosity. When W. E. B. Du Bois claims that slavery was “singularly disastrous for modern civilization” or James Baldwin claims that whites “have brought humanity to the edge of oblivion: because they think they are white,” the instinct is to cry exaggeration. But there really is no other way to read the presidency of Donald Trump. Yes, at first glance, the notion that Trumpian white racial nationalism is a threat to the whole world, or the downfall of civilization, etc. seems a bit of an exaggeration. Barring global thermonuclear war, Trump and his successors aren't going to bring dow...