{"id":2047,"date":"2020-09-03T14:40:33","date_gmt":"2020-09-03T14:40:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rasmusen.org\/blog1\/?p=2047"},"modified":"2020-09-16T13:37:37","modified_gmt":"2020-09-16T13:37:37","slug":"economics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rasmusen.org\/blog1\/economics\/","title":{"rendered":"Economics"},"content":{"rendered":"

This page will be for notes and links on economics. <\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Hardness versus Importance in Economics.<\/a> (Akerlof and Ellison)\n
  2. Harald Uhlig (2012) “Economics and Reality” <\/a\n\n\n\n
  3. Is the Tesla Stock Split Paradox Really Paradoxical?<\/a>\n<\/ol>\n

    ###################################<\/p>\n

    From the Gelman blog<\/a>: <\/p>\n

    \n From Larry White, quoted by Don Boudreaux:<\/p>\n

    As late as the 1989 edition [of his textbook, Paul Samuelson] and coauthor William Nordhaus wrote: \u201cThe Soviet economy is proof that, contrary to what many skeptics had earlier believed, a socialist command economy can function and even thrive.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

    Asher is right. Samuelson and Nordhaus were making a political statement, in an effort to sound sagely moderate between the extremes of marxism and capitalism, which was unscholarly, since the truth often *is* one extreme or the other. In everyday life, if half the newspapers says 2+2=4 and half say 2+2=5, most people think saying 2+2=4.5 is the praiseworthy, moderate, position. But their “thriving” statement, while conveying falsehood and blameworthy, has a correct interpretation too. The Soviet Union was much richer in 1989 than it was in 1919. It had industrialized. It had radios and TVs and airliners. It showed an important fact that economists should emphasize: no matter how bad your economic policies, it’s really hard to keep technical change and regular investment from making your country richer over time. You may only get half the growth of your neighbors, but it’s still growth. <\/p>\n

    That was actually the big point of Schumpeter, Samuelson’s advisor. In the long run, all that matters is growth, not year-to-year macro policy, and all that matters to growth is innovation, so fostering innovation (broadly construed to include opening up new restaurants, etc.) is all that really matters. And, we can add as an appendix, unless you’re the US, it’s not scientific and technical innovation that matters— you can import that from the US– it’s “soft” innovation (the new restaurant) and use of imported techniques (wireless telephones in Indian villages). <\/p>\n

    ##############################################################<\/p>\n

    Examining Extreme and Deep Poverty in the United States<\/a>
    \nJamie Bryan Hall and Robert Rector<\/p>\n

    On January 24, 2018, Nobel Prize\u2013winning economist Angus
    \nDeaton published an op-ed in The New York Times entitled
    \n\u201cThe U.S. Can No Longer Hide from Its Deep Poverty Problem.\u201d
    \nAccording to Deaton, 5.3 million Americans are living on less than
    \n$4.00 per day and \u201care as destitute as the world\u2019s poorest people.\u2026
    \n[Their] suffering, through material poverty and poor health, is as
    \nbad [as] or worse than that of the people in Africa or in Asia.\u201d\n <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

    Deaton cannot be called an honest man. This goes beyond stupidity. It has to be deliberate lying. This is his area of expertise. He knows that you can’t use official statistics of earned income to measure consumption. He might just as well say that many millions of Americans are living on $0.00\/day, because children don’t have any income. Children aren’t starving to death, even though their income level is extremely low. You have to look at spending, just as Deaton himself is doing when he talks about poor people in Africa and Asia who also have zero money income (many are outside the market economy) but don’t have zero food and shelter consumption. <\/p>\n

    Since 1980, the
    \nConsumer Expenditure Survey (CEX) has reported
    \non the annual consumption expenditures of 222,170
    \nhouseholds. Of these 222,170 cases, 175 reported
    \nspending less than $4.00 per person per day. That is
    \none household in 1,270. Rather than 1.7 percent of the
    \npopulation living in deep poverty, expenditure surveys show that the figure is only 0.08 percent.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

    Economist Bruce Meyer of the University of Chicago has shown that it is possible to use the CEX data
    \nto construct a far more accurate measure of poverty.24 For example, the CEX has shown for decades
    \nthat the households in official poverty routinely
    \nreport spending roughly $2.40 for every dollar of
    \napparent income. For families in \u201cextreme poverty,\u201d
    \nwith a consistent income of $2.00 or less per person
    \nper day, the expenditure-to-income ratio rises to
    \naround $25.00 to $1.00.25<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

    ##############################################################<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    This page will be for notes and links on economics. Hardness versus Importance in Economics. (Akerlof and Ellison) Harald Uhlig (2012) “Economics and Reality”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2047","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rasmusen.org\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2047","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rasmusen.org\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rasmusen.org\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rasmusen.org\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rasmusen.org\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2047"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.rasmusen.org\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2047\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2237,"href":"https:\/\/www.rasmusen.org\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2047\/revisions\/2237"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rasmusen.org\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2047"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rasmusen.org\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2047"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rasmusen.org\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2047"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}