I recently read Finite and Infinite Games, by James Carse, poolside while on vacation. Excerpt: Seriousness is always related to roles, or abstractions. We are likely to be more serious with police officers when we find them uniformed and performing their mandated roles than when we find them in the process of changing into their [...]

Tags: Carse, Cowen, Elk, Finite and Infinite Games, Krugman, Yglesias
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I’ve just read Race Against The Machine, a new Kindle Single by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, which argues contra Tyler Cowen’s The Great Stagnation that we are witnessing not a slowdown, but a positive acceleration of technological change. Brynjolfsson and McAfee argue that the fast pace of innovation is creating mismatches between humans and [...]

Tags: Beckworth, Brynjolfsson, Cowen, Doctorow, Kling, McAfee, Race Against The Machine, Rand, skill-biased technical change, technologies of control, technologies of resistance, The Great Stagnation, total factor productivity
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“There’s something wrong with everything. In macro; not, you know, in life.” That may not be a verbatim quotation, but I remember Tyler explaining this in PhD macro I, and it has stuck with me. You don’t really understand a school of macroeconomic thought until you can dispassionately evaluate both its strengths and weaknesses. If [...]

Tags: Austrian business cycle theory, Austrian economics, Bachmann, Cowen, Hayek, Kling, Kydland and Prescott, Long and Plosser, macro, Mises, Selgin, Sumner, Tea Party
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Adam Ozimek thinks I’m crazy. With respect to the presidential election in 2012, I wrote on Twitter that I’m “Pretty much indifferent between Palin / Bachmann / Obama / Romney / Huckabee / Gingrich / Trump. I won’t lose any sleep no matter what.” I should be clear that I’m not indifferent to the outcome [...]

Tags: Bachmann, Cowen, Davies, Gingrich, Huckabee, Obama, Ozimek, Palin, politics, Romney, Rummel, serene detachment, Trump
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I promise not to do too many more posts about a) macro or b) Paul Krugman. I don’t just love macro, these are not my most popular posts, and Krugman is too shrill to read on a regular basis. Nevertheless, I think I can sort through some of the recent disagreement about liquidity traps. The [...]

Tags: Cowen, fiscal policy, Keynes, Keynesianism, Kling, Krugman, liquidity trap, monetary policy
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Paul Krugman disses RBC theory and those who study it as unscientific. I’m not an RBC theorist, but I’ll stick up for freshwater macro. Here are some reasons why RBC theory deserves more respect than Krugman gives it. 1. Suppose monetary policy is conducted so that all nominal shocks are perfectly offset. Zero percent of [...]

Tags: Caplin, Cowen, Krugman, legal restrictions theory, macro, monetary theory, New Keynesianism, real business cycles, Spulber
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Today on Twitter, I got involved in a discussion of private law with Karl Smith (or whichever of the Modeled Behavior bloggers controls @modeledbehavior) [Update: It was Adam Ozimek]. My interlocutor was perfectly willing to accept that a system effectively of private law was suitable for non-violent offenses. Violators would pay restitution equal to damages [...]

Tags: anarchy, Anderson, Benson, brutality, Cowen, Hill, Leeson, Ozimek, Powell, private law, Smith, Somalia, Stringham
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Tyler has been defending his stagnation hypothesis with an intuitive argument about when the CPI is most skewed. I’m not 100% persuaded of Tyler’s intuition. There is a severe conceptual problem that plagues any measure of inflation. It seems easy enough to measure the change in price of a basket of goods, but real-life consumers [...]

Tags: Cowen, CPI bias, inflation, The Great Stagnation
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I’m tempted to do a serious review of Tyler’s book, but I’m happy to outsource most of my comments to Arnold Kling. Instead, I’ll just make one brief point about the validity of the various numbers used to justify claims of stagnation or non-stagnation. All of the numbers in play are fundamentally non-economic. Whether we’re [...]

Tags: Age of the Infovore, Cowen, Kling, The Great Stagnation, Win the Future
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Tyler Cowen’s new eBooklet, The Great Stagnation, is a sober, moderate take on our current economic troubles. Except that it’s not. Straight out of Persecution and the Art of Writing, it is a book designed to appeal to the “sane, honest middle” of American politics, but for the careful, enlightened reader, there is a hidden [...]

Tags: anarchism, Cowen, humor, revolution, straussian, The Great Stagnation, Thiel
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