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Read More From the economy (and asterisk-biz)OK, so who spent a significant part of their evening reading about pigs and pork thanks to a Twitter row about CRESC? Yeah, me. I think that paper is rather good, and you can see the applications to something like this. That said, I wonder how euro-compliant some of it is. I’d really like something…
Read More PigsJust a quick hit, in comments at Steve Randy Waldman’s: Economists who think finance is merely a veil over real production also think real production is basically just like the easy bits of finance, for example, British government bonds – negligible transaction costs, huge liquidity, instant and frictionless trading, authoritative pricing and well-defined pricing models,…
Read More 37.2 homogenous capital units and one for the barmanSo, reading the LSE Growth Commission report. There’s the usual stuff about infrastructure, and they want both an infrastructure bank and an infrastructure planning commission (I remember that!) and crappy provision for small and medium-sized firms’ financing needs, hence a KFW-analogue. So far, so radical consensus. There’s also a weird fetish for academies; apparently we…
Read More Our economic future: Other.Inspired by this weekend’s story that you now pay a transaction fee to fly Ryanair even if you use a Ryanair credit card, which is apparently a thing that exists even if it sounds like it shouldn’t, I have been thinking about their business model. It is not what you may think it is. This…
Read More A brief inquiry into the nature and consequences of think-of-a-number pricingEconomics is an agenda-setting system. Here’s a working example – Noah Smith engaging Robert Gordon (who is in his turn drinking from the poisoned well of Tyler Cowan). Gordon’s big idea is that y’know how things aren’t so great? Well, they’re always going to be awful, so there’s nothing can be done about it! And…
Read More Economic reality is yesterday’s political choiceOK, here’s a photo from my summer. The car, in front of the modernist building, in the rather dilapidated car park, is an actual product of the DDR, a Wartburg, with Hungarian plates. Where are we, and why? Obviously, we’re in Archway, N19, north London but not the cupcakey sort. The car park is next…
Read More What I did on my holidays: a stability pact photo“Why the Olympic Games mean we should support my politics” is already a sizeable genre, as Chris Brooke pointed out, quoting Daniel Davies in plausibly deniable mode. However, one of the very few pieces in this line that is worth reading is this one by Will Hutton, using the British Olympic team as an exemplar…
Read More The radical consensusAnother request-for-book, borrowing the title from a favourite Daniel Davies-ism from the days he used to say rude things about the IMF. It strikes me as interesting that the idea of inflation/devaluation/currency debasement has such long legs and is written so deep in the culture, when its opposite – deflation/recession/depression – is so much more…
Read More when the invisible hand kills a million people, it leaves no fingerprintsRalph Musgrave‘s economics blog makes a case for a program of time-limited payments to companies who hire the unemployed, although I’m not sure if Musgrave is thinking of it as a permanent feature of the welfare state rather than an emergency response to depression. I might quibble with a couple of aspects – for example,…
Read More an original idea? the archive is full of ‘em