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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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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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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Arnold Kling tentatively postulates that central banks can, at most, select between a low-stable inflation regime and a high-variable inflation regime. Bryan Caplan proposes a quick test, which I hereby supply. Below are some scatterplots of inflation variance versus inflation means for 176 countries. The data is from the World Bank, which gets it from [...]

Tags: Caplan, IMF, inflation, Kling, monetary policy, World Bank
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Two of my favorite intellectuals, Arnold Kling and Richard Epstein, have each offered opinions on how to “improve” soccer. I am dismayed and disappointed. Their proposals are not for modest changes (e.g., electronic assistance for the referee) that would preserve the basic feel of the game. Instead, they want to induce “more scoring” (Kling) and [...]

Tags: baseball, Epstein, Kling, meddlesomeness, rant, soccer
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All the cool people read this book when it came out in November, but I just finished it now. It is truly excellent. It is my new go-to what-is-economics-all-about recommendation. Buy it now in hardcover or Kindle format.

Tags: books, economics, From Poverty to Prosperity, Kling, Schultz
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