Trade and Employment

I teach my undergraduates that trade has no long-run effect on aggregate employment. I teach it because it's right, and very few economists would disagree. Tyler Cowen's recent postings on MR about the negative employment effects of trade have the potential to mislead. To the extent that trade and technology correlate with persistent disemployment in …

Saturday Afternoon Bemusement

Tyler Cowen makes the case that a large, inefficient public sector can be a good thing: we should not be trying to squeeze the entire economy into the shoebox of the dynamic but risky “Economy I.” For public choice reasons, as well understood by Karl Polanyi (an underrated public choice theorist if there ever was …

EJW Symposium on America’s Debt Crisis

I have just finished reading a fascinating symposium of papers on America's sovereign debt crisis published in the most recent Econ Journal Watch (volume 9, number 1: January 2012). It is introduced by Tyler Cowen, and includes short papers by Jeffrey Rogers Hummel, Garett Jones, Arnold Kling, Joseph Minarik, and Peter Wallinson. It is fascinating, if …

Facebook and the End of the World

AEI is sponsoring a debate tomorrow on whether Facebook is destroying human relationships. The debate boasts a formidable lineup: Roger Scruton, Adam Keiper, and Tyler Cowen. It occurred to me recently that one unintended negative consequence of Facebook is the potential destruction of, not friendships, but acquaintanceships. I have many friendly acquaintances who are my …

Three Budgets

The Wall Street Journal had an interesting article yesterday by Stanford economist John Taylor (of Taylor Rule fame) looking at three different U.S. budgets as a percentage of GDP over the next decade.  Here is a chart which nicely tells the tale: My chief quibble with the article is that this sentence is misleading: "And if GDP and …

Signaling or Public Service? A Cowen-esque Post

I have a colleague who tapes dozens and dozens of news articles outside his office on the hall walls.  If you are a professor, I'm sure you have a similar colleague around.  So, are these people consciously engaging in signaling to their colleagues and students about their political preferences?  Their erudition?  That they keep up on current events?  …

Thanks, Tyler

On behalf of Pileus, I wanted to thank Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution for introducing us to his readers.  I also wanted to welcome those readers to our blog; I hope you'll find Pileus to be an interesting addition to your daily blog reading. As I noted earlier, MR is one of my regular reads and a top …