- “Really? When is the last time you ran a search with DuckDuckGo? Too often, he seems to be stretching the evidence. He argues that, given the social aspects of the workplace, “companies are actually responsible for some of our most important relationships.” But that’s a function of work — not of corporate life. People at nonprofits make friends, too. Cowen asserts in defense of Amazon, “My options as a book consumer never have been better.” He includes as evidence of a competitive book market the option (which he doesn’t condone) of “illegal downloads of free PDFs.” Jeff Bezos must rue such defenders. (Bezos founded Amazon and owns The Washington Post.)”
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Roger Lowenstein reviews Tyler Cowen’s latest book. I myself have not read it yet, but the review was interesting to me, in particular this excerpt about illegal PDF’s and how they encourage competition.
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.. - “Alwyn’s related analysis of published studies is even more striking. He shows that, in a sample of 1359 IV regressions in 31 papers published in the journals of the American Economic Association,
“… statistically significant IV results generally depend upon only one or two observations or clusters, excluded instruments often appear to be irrelevant, there is little statistical evidence that OLS is actually substantively biased, and IV confidence intervals almost always include OLS point estimates.” ”
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Econometric nerds/students only (consider yourself warned) – but IV isn’t as great as it is made out to be. Occam’s razor is massively ignored in econometrics.
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.. - “The Fiscal Affairs Department and the Institute for Capacity Development of the IMF are pleased to announce that the online course on Public Financial Management (PFM) will relaunch on May 1, 2019 and remain open year-round. In its two previous offerings, this free online course has been taken by more than 2,200 participants in 194 countries, with very high satisfaction rates. Taught by more than 15 experts of the Fiscal Affairs Department, the course is open for government officials, staff of bilateral and multilateral development agencies, civil society organizations, parliamentarians, academics and the general public. The course has been updated in 2019 to reflect the revisions brought to IMF’s PFM standards and tools and adopted in the last twelve months – namely the Public Investment Management Assessment (PIMA) framework and the Natural Resource Management pillar of the Fiscal Transparency Code (FTC).”
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You might, as a student of economics or policy making, want to consider taking this course.
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.. - “So why, then, does the government tax, under the MMT view? Two big reasons: One, taxation gets people in the country to use the government-issued currency. Because they have to pay income taxes in dollars, Americans have a reason to earn dollars, spend dollars, and otherwise use dollars as opposed to, say, bitcoins or euros. Second, taxes are one tool governments can use to control inflation. They take money out of the economy, which keeps people from bidding up prices.And why does the government issue bonds? According to MMT, government-issued bonds aren’t strictly necessary. The US government could, instead of issuing $1 in Treasury bonds for every $1 in deficit spending, just create the money directly without issuing bonds.”
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Yet another explainer of MMT – it’s counterintuitive (at least to me), and I’m still not sure it makes sense and will work – but I understand it better than I did before upon reading this article.
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.. - “This is an issue for economics too: the construction of the deflators used to turn nominal pound or dollar GDP into ‘real’ GDP, on which so much policy hangs, relies on a theory of constant, known preferences which determine the utility of consumption, and yet modern economic growth is all about creating wants for new goods and services for which preferences have to be created. So at a time of rapid innovation it is not at all clear what the deflators and ‘real’ GDP measures are measuring.”
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Diane Coyle reviews a book that helps us understand Amartya Sen’s work better. I found this excerpt above quite interesting.
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