My favorite economics reporters at NPR’s Planet Money have a new podcast following up on the results of the so-called “stimulus” to date. Listen here: The Great Stimulus Experiment. Here is a comment I made on the ...
exploring the worlds of economics and philosophy with passionate skepticism.
..about the government doing Adobe’s dirty work?
So now the EU is jumping on the government bandwagon to help protect Adobe’s proprietary, near-monopoly in rich web software from fresh competition: European regulators have teamed with the Federal Trade Commission in probing Apple's policies for mobile software developers, The Post has learned. In June, the FTC opened an investigation into Apple's decision to ban ...
…about getting into school through a lottery?
Reason.tv interviews the director of “The Lottery”. She is clearly not a right-wing ideologue, going out of her way to praise the President’s “race to the top” education program (a program I personally ...
…about economic wisdom from Pixar?
“What Google Could Learn from Pixar" by Peter Sims at the Harvard Business Review is a quick must read. It’s a great mini-history of the single greatest filmmaking collective of all time. Pixar is magic. Together with Apple, they represent the companies I admire most. One interesting tidbit is how Pixar’s co-founder Ed Catmull ...
…about money “sitting idle”?
In his latest plea for government to ramp up even more spending in order to keep over-expanded state governments from cutting back down to affordable size, Paul Krugman, the nobel-prize-winning economist, made a fairly shocking error: That is, for all the talk of a failed stimulus, if you look at government spending as a whole you ...
…about an Austrian perspective on our economy from Arnold Kling?
Here’s some great analysis from economist Arnold Kling via When Labor Is Capital: The Limits of Keynesian Policy: The Keynesian prescription for a recession is to increase government spending. Even if the resulting output is not valuable (the proverbial digging ditches and filling them in again), the thinking is that this will stimulate productive output. Again, this ...
…about the “recovery”?
The facts speak for themselves via Reuters: Companies cut back on temporary hires, a segment normally considered a harbinger of future hiring. Government jobs dried up much faster than anticipated and not just because it saw the end of short-term census jobs. The jobless rate held steady at 9.5 percent, defying expectations for a slight increase, but that ...
…about An August Surprise from Obama?
This just in via James Pethokoukis at Reuters. Fannie and Freddie, who managed to help cause the worst housing boom and bust and deepest downturn since 1930 while utterly escaping this year’s Financial “reform” bill may be unleashed to perform an epic pre-election payoff scheme: Main Street may be about to get its own gigantic ...
…about defending the Volt?
I was excited about the Volt. Not so much now that it’s basically had its aggressive styling replaced with boring me-too rounded nonsense. It’s a luxury-priced economy car. So when I saw the NY Times rip it apart, I wasn’t that surprised. Now Mother Jones is coming to the defense, presumably on green-at-any-cost ...
I’m John. This blog is where I work through ideas. I’m not an economist. In some cases, that may work to my advantage (or so I’m told). Still, I’m bound to make mistakes. That’s kinda the point. Be skeptical. Take everything with a grain of salt. Push back. I’m looking for feedback. Oh… and I’m not this serious in real life. I’m actually kinda goofy.
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