Category Archives: Uncategorized

One can make a reasonable argument that the concept of an economy and the study of economics begins with the idea of specialization, in the sense that those who function within an economy specialize in one kind of production, but then trade with others to consume a broader array of good. Along these lines, theContinue reading “The Need for Generalists”

There’s an old rueful line from firms that advertise: “We know that half of all we spend on advertising is wasted, but we don’t know which half.” It’s not clear who originally coined the phrase. But we do know that the effects of advertising have changed dramatically in a digital age. Half of all advertisingContinue reading “"Half the Money I Spend on Advertising is Wasted, and the Trouble is I Don’t Know Which Half"”

Randomization is one of the most persuasive techniques for determining cause and effect. Half of a certain group get a treatment; half don’t. Compare. If the groups were truly chosen at random, and the treatment was truly the only difference between them, and the differences in outcomes are meaningful and the size of the samplesContinue reading “Early Examples of Randomization in the Social Sciences”

I’m taking some family vacation the next 10 days or so. The lake country of northern Minnesota calls. My wife says that I get a distinctively blissful expression when I’m sitting in the back of a canoe with a paddle in my hand. While I’m gone, I’ve prescheduled a string of posts that look atContinue reading “The Modern Shape-Up Labor Market”

Harald Uhlig delivered a talk on “Money and Banking: Some DSGE Challenges” (video here, slides here) at the Nobel Symposium on Money and Banking recently held in Stockholm. He introduces the “Chicken Paper Conundrum,” which he attributes to Ed Prescott.  I’ve definitely read academic papers, as well as listed to policy discussions, which follow thisContinue reading “The Chicken Paper Conundrum”

Public programs for pre-K education have a worthy goal: reducing the gaps in educational achievement that manifest themselves in early grades. I find myself rooting for such programs to succeed. But there are now two major randomized control trial studies looking at the the results of publicly provided pre-K programs, and neither one finds lastingContinue reading “Early Childhood Education Fails Another Randomized Trial”

The cause seemed worthy, and the policy mild. Militia groups in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) were taxing and extorting revenue from those who mined like tin, tungsten, and tantalum. Thus, Section 1502 of the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010 required companies to disclose the source of their purchases of such minerals. The hopeContinue reading “Conflict Minerals and Unexpected Tradeoffs”

“In the last quarter-century, one of the most intriguing findings in behavioral science goes under the unlovely name of `preference reversals between joint and separate evaluations of options.’ The basic idea is that when people evaluate options A and B separately, they prefer A to B, but when they evaluate the two jointly, they preferContinue reading “On Preferring A to B, While Also Preferring B to A”

Human capital in general, and educational background in particular, are one of the key ingredients for economic growth. But the US had a period of about 20 years, for those born through most of the 1950s and 1960s, where educational attainment barely budged.  Urvi Neelakantan and Jessie Romero provide an overview in “Slowing Growth inContinue reading “When Growth of US Education Attainment Went Flat”

John Quincy Adams, the sixth President of  the United States (and son of the second president John Adams and his wife Abigail) started a diary when he was 12 in 1779, and added to it continuously for almost 70 years. Some days the long entries were more than 5,000 words. There’s one stretch of 25Continue reading “"The Seeds of the Declaration of Independence Are Yet Maturing"”