faulker020

So you want to understand the real Japan. You have a sense that the typical stereotypes are wrong and outdated and full of derp, and you want to go deeper than anime or "crazy Japan" blogs will take you. So you decide to ask your friendly neighborhood Noah: "What books can I read that will help me understand the real Japan at a deep level?" Unfortunately Noah hasn't had his requisite 3 daily cups of oversteeped black tea, so he grouchily responds: "How about instead of reading a book, you learn the language fluently, live there for a few years, talk to a bunch of people, and learn for yourself?" But then Noah gets his caffeine fix, and the norepinephrine flows freely through his brain, and he says "Oh, BOOKS? Sure, I got books." And walking over to his lovely fake mahogany Wayfair bookshelf, he proceeds to make you the following list: Culture and Daily Life 1. New Japan , by David Matsumoto This book, which you can read in an hour or less, ...

I recently wrote a Bloomberg View post about political-economic ideologies, and how society is quicker to change than individual human beings. The upshot was that free-market ideology seems - to many Americans, and also incidentally to me - to have mostly hit a wall in terms of its ability to improve our lives, and so society will inevitably embrace an alternative, despite the protests of diehard free-marketers. Bryan Caplan is flabbergasted at the notion that free-market ideology (aka "neoliberalism") has actually been tried in the U.S.: The claim that "free-market dogma" is the "reigning economic policy" of the United States or any major country seems so absurd, so contrary to big blatant facts (like government spending as a share of GDP, for starters), that I'm dumb-founded.   This is pretty much exactly the attitude I described in my post! "Of course neoliberalism hasn't failed; we just never really tried it." David Henderson has a ...

The whole world is in need of a break from the madness, and someone on Twitter asked me to do a blog post about whether Firefly is overrated. So instead of econ or politics or serious stuff, let's talk about a television show that got canceled 13 years ago! :-) The answer to the question in the blog post title is: "Of course not." In the strictest sense, no sci-fi show is overrated, because people in general ought to watch more sci-fi and less of whatever they're watching now. Science fiction has taken over movies , but not TV. Fortunately, with great programs like Black Mirror, Stranger Things, etc., there's still lots of good stuff out there. But Firefly, more than probably any other show, holds a special place in the heart of my generation of geek-Americans. And it really is a great show. It's consistently at the top of user-generated lists of the best sci-fi shows ever. It's the subject of countless...OK, I'm not even going to finish this paragra...

Tyler Cowen, my esteemed Bloomberg View colleague, has a post about Donald Trump's comments predicting a "rigged" election. Though Tyler states explicitly that he is not defending Trump's comments, the post certainly reads like a defense. Tyler's main points seem to be: 1. Elections really are "rigged" in some sense, and 2. Accusations of election "rigging" often come from the Left. I don't want to put words in Tyler's mouth, though, so I'll repost much of his post : [O]ver the last few years or indeed decades I also have seen the following:  1. Numerous arguments insist that money buys elections and campaign finance reform is imperative...  2. Numerous arguments that Republican-backed voter registration requirements are keeping significant numbers of voters, most of all minority voters, away from the polls...  4. Do we not all teach the Gibbard-Sattherthwaite theorem to our Principles classes on week three?  In case you forget, th...

I recently wrote a Bloomberg View post about consumption Euler equations, and how these are increasingly being targeted as a broken piece of macroeconomics. I traced the idea back to Milton Friedman and the Permanent Income Hypothesis, and Bloomberg decided (wisely) to go with Friedman for the headline. "Economists Give Up on Milton Friedman's Biggest Idea" is probably going to get orders of magnitude more clicks than "Economists Search for Replacement for Infinitely Lived Perfectly Far-Sighted Model of Consumption Smoothing". BUT, anyway, Emily Skarbek decided that Uncle Miltie needed some defending, and wrote a blog post praising his legacy. Most of the post discusses stuff that I didn't touch on in my Bloomberg post, since I was only talking about the PIH. So I decided to do a post about Milton Friedman's overall legacy - actually, much too big a topic to do justice to in one post, but hey, that never stopped anyone before, so what the heck! I pitch...

Tyler Cowen (now a Bloomberg View colleague of mine) took a crack at this question back in February, and I've been thinking about it ever since. Here's my unified theory of why a guy like Trump managed to take over the Republican party this year, when nothing similar had ever happened before in living memory. First of all, a note about causality. Most events are the result of a chain of causes - if one link in the chain falls apart, the event doesn't happen. This is not the way human intuition naturally thinks about causality - we instinctively imagine each event as the sum of causal factors, and attribute some percent of responsibility to each factor. But with a causal chain, each link is responsible for 100% of the causality. Just like the marginal value of a right shoe and the marginal value of a left shoe are both equal to 100% of the total value of a pair of shoes . So I think that Trump is a special human being. He's a reality star, a possibly-faux-billionaire c...

Zak David, a quant trader, recently wrote a post criticizing Scott Sumner's idea of NGDP futures market targeting. Sumner fired back with a defense of the idea , and Zak responded with an update to his post. I want to see if I can explain Zak's ideas in a little greater detail. Basically, he's right. To recap, the original NGDP futures targeting idea goes something like this: 1. The Fed sets an NGDP target (say, 5%). 2. The Fed then offers to enter into any number of NGDP futures contract with anyone who wants, at a price equal to the target. So if I take a $1000 long position in these futures, and NGDP comes in at 10% (double the target), I get $2000 back. If I take a $1000 short position, and NGDP comes in at 2.5% (half the target), I get $2000 back. And so on. The Fed is always on the other side of the deal, and I can make as many of these deals as I want (assuming I can post sufficient margin). 3. The Fed then makes monetary policy automatically in response to people e...