Thursday, December 12, 2013

  1. Meera K.@MeeraKal3h
  2. can you take my econ final for me tomorrow? It's micro, so you should be okay :)
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    1. set s=D for competitive mkts and MR=MC for monopolies and you should be fine
  • Monday, October 21, 2013

    Economics and Science

    In the New York times, Raj Chetty discusses the Nobel winners and economics as a science.  It is much better than this silly essay by Alex Rosenberg and Tyler Curtain, in which they argue that economics is not a science because it can't make predictions and then sugges that "an economic approach had much to contribute to the design and creative management of such institutions. Fixing bad economic and political institutions (concentrations of power, collusions and monopolies), improving good ones (like the Fed’s open-market operations), designing new ones (like electromagnetic bandwidth auctions), in the private and public sectors, are all attainable tasks of economic theory." How will economic theory help you to fix, improve or create institutions if it does not make predictions about the results of those changes?

    Tuesday, September 3, 2013

    Ronald Coase

    Coase passed away.


    Thanks to Doug North and Lee Benham, I was fortunate to see Ronald Coase in person on several occasions. I remember the first time someone asked him about the appropriate size of government. He said that it was a bit like the 400 pound man who asked his doctor how much he should way. The doctor responded “Well, less.”

    Monday, August 26, 2013

    Another Loss

    This has been a rough couple of months for Economic History and American History. I posted earlier this summer abou the death of Bob Fogel. Shortly after that, Edmund Morgan, author of American Slavery American Freedom: the Ordeal of Colonial Virginia and numerous other works, passed away. In July, Cynthia Taft Morris died. Along with Irma Adelman, Cynthia was a pioneer in the effort to measure institutions and institutional change.  Then Pauline Maier. Maier is probably best known for American Scripture: The Making of the Declaration of Independence, but her paper on "The Revolutionary Origins of the American Corporation," William and Mary Quarterly (1993) has been widely cited in American economic history. Today I read that David Landes has passed away.   

    Saturday, June 15, 2013

    More New History of Capitalism (aka lets just make stuff up)

    Since the NY Times article on the New History of Captalism, I have been trying to catch up with the recent work in this field. Unfortunately, I was dissapointed by Jonathan Levy's Freaks of Fortune. I just started Julia Ott's When Wall Street Met Main Street. On the first page of the first chapter she declares that "Severe financial panics in 1873 and 1893 punctuated a prolonged economic depression, as prices, profits, per capita output and productivity growth fell steadily from 1873 to 1896." She does not provide the source for this statement. Most of it is not true. Prices fell, but real output per capita increased. Overall, the period was one of relatively rapid productivity growth.


    This is a graph of real gdp per capita during the period in question.


    Source:www.measuringworth.com

    Per capita output did not fall steadily; it rose unsteadily.
    This information is not hard to find.

    Wednesday, June 12, 2013