Author Archives: Susann Lees

The Jones Act pops into public consciousness every few years, perhaps most recently in fall 2017 when President Trump suspended the law for 10 days to help hurricane assistance in Puerto Rico. Colin Grabow, Inu Manak, and Daniel Ikenson offer background on the law and make the case for its repeal in in “The JonesContinue reading “A Primer on the Jones Act and American Shipping”

The shape of an economics research article is changing: much longer, and with more co-authors,David Card and Stefano DellaVigna documented these patterns in “Nine Facts about Top Journals in Economics,” back in the March 2013 in the Journal of Economic Literature (51:1, pp. 144�161, freely available here, or with a subscription here). They have nowContinue reading “What Should an Economics Research Article Look Like?”

I’m the sort of joyless and soul-killing conversationalist who likes to use facts as the background for arguments. In that spirit, here’s an overview of some facts about global trade balances, taken from the IMF External Sector Report: Tackling Global Imbalances and Rising Trade Tensions (July 2018). Here’s a list of the 15 countries withContinue reading “Some Facts on Global Current Account Balances”

About 160 countries around the world, including all the other high-income countries of the world, use a value-added tax. The US has no value added tax, but 45 states and several thousand cities, use a sales tax as an alternative method of taxing consumption.  John L. Mikesell and Sharon N. Kioko provide a useful overviewContinue reading “The Emergence and Erosion of the Retail Sales Tax”

For 31 years, I’ve been editing the Journal of Economic Perspectives. At the most basic level, editing is about pushing the author to have a point in the first place, and to make it clearly. Sounds simple, perhaps? On complex subjects, meeting those criteria can be a high hurdle to cross.  Albert Jay Nock, inContinue reading “Albert Jay Nock on the Three Rules of Editorial Policy”

I was hired back in 1986 to be the Managing Editor for a new academic economics journal, at the time unnamed, but which soon launched as the Journal of Economic Perspectives. The JEP is published by the American Economic Association, which back in 2011 decided–to my delight–that it would be freely available on-line, from the currentContinue reading “Summer 2018 Journal of Economic Perspectives Available On-line”

I sometimes say, with a smile and a wince, that it only takes three data-points for economists to start building a theory — and that in pinch, we can make due with less data. But of course, anyone who develops a theory based on limited data is prone to false extrapolations. Mark Twain offered oneContinue reading “Mark Twain on Extrapolation: "Such Wholesale Returns of Conjecture Out of Such a Trifling Investment of Fact"”

There’s an saying along these general lines “If you�re not a liberal when you�re 25, you have no heart. If you�re not a conservative by the time you�re 35, you have no brain.” Who said it? One blessing of the web is that I can fiddle around with such questions without needing to spend threeContinue reading “"Whoever Is Not a Liberal at 20 Has No Heart …"”

I like to think of myself as an individual who makes up his own mind, but that’s almost certainly wrong for me, and you, gentle reader, as well. A vast literature in psychology points out that, in effect, a number of separate personalities live in each of our brains. Which decision gets made at aContinue reading “How Coalitional Instincts Make Weird Groups and Stupid People”

Making predictions is hard, especially about the future. It’s a comment that seems to have been attributed to everyone from Nostradamus to Niels Bohr to Yogi Berra. But it’s deeply true. Most of us have a tendency to make statements about the future with a high level of self-belief, avoid later reconsidering how wrong weContinue reading “Difficulties of Making Predictions: Global Power Politics Edition”