Maxine Udall (girl economist)
Maxine Udall (girl economist)
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    Maxine's Essays

    • 21st Century Regress
      Sometimes it seems like the world is going to hell and there's absolutely nothing a girl economist can do about it.
    • What Exactly Are We Crowding Out?
      The current economic downturn isn't a random draw of a black ball from an urn containing white balls and black balls. There's no sampling distribution. Very specific policies and actions landed us here. Now we must decide not only what policies need to be put in place to prevent it happening again, but also what policies would best drive us out of the ditch faster and sustainably.
    • I Wish It Were Only Butter
      We should be giving up some butter if we must. We should not give up education or health investment (or infrastructure or the environment (hello, BP). They may be the only legacies of any value that we pass on to our children and grandchildren.
    • Rational Health Investment?
      The obvious "market solution" is to improve the long run return on investments in health among the disadvantaged through meaningful and effective publicly funded education. The obvious short run "market solution" is to reduce the costs of investment and the shadow price of health for the disadvantaged by providing health insurance cover and reduced out-of-pocket costs.
    • The Socrates Parameter
      To the extent that our limbic systems respond to such engineering by over-riding the judgment of our frontal lobe and to the extent that our frontal lobe is deprived of the information it requires to make a rationally self-interested judgment, we are not only pigs and fools, we are slaves.
    • The Economic Rewards of Virtue
      If individual virtue tempers our "piggy" desires and conditions our choices to something that is both individually and socially better, then the economic rewards of virtue as embodied in and promoted by societal norms and institutions are far greater than we have ever suspected. As economists, we would do well to recognize this when we teach U max.
    • The Market for Morals
      Markets then are places where more is exchanged than goods and services, labor and product, credit, and interest. They are places where we also develop the personal virtues of temperance and prudence and the social virtues of benevolence and justice. When they function well, they produce trust, loyalty, and sympathy among those who trade there.
    • Post-Modern Applied Economics: It’s the Error Term, Stupid
      Maxine believes it’s time to refocus attention and discussion on the error term. It is often where much of the action is in our models. It is where unexpectedly catastrophic events dwell resulting in fat tails. It is where our animal spirits manifest and cause us to do the right thing or the wrong thing or the thing everyone else is doing rather than the self-interested, fully-informed rational thing. It is where God and miracles and chance dwell.
    • Intergenerational Win-Win: Health Insurance, Education, Environment, Infrastructure
      So when we’re talking about fiscal stimulus packages and we’re borrowing from our grandchildren to finance them, we should be thinking about how to use stimulus monies to create value for those grandchildren AND stimulate our economy.
    • Short-term Private Payoffs, Long-term Social Costs
      The real health reform discussion, the one we should be having, is “What must we do to create a health system that is both efficient and fair?” The answer will almost certainly include relegating the private sector to markets where market forces or regulation are effective at aligning short-term private incentives and goals with long-term societal interests. If such markets are scarce or non-existent in health, then the private health sector will be of limited value.

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    « The Market for Morals | Main | Health Reform: If Not Now, When? »

    03/05/2010

    Bring Back the Robber Barons? I Don't Think So.

    Before we take Daniel Henninger’s advice over at the WSJ and Bring Back the Robber Barons, let’s consider the proposition more fully by reflecting on an alternative view of corporate “entrepreneurship” offered by Barry C. Lynn and Phillip Longman at Washington Monthly.

    And while we're at it, let's perform this thought experiment: imagine all the entrepreneurship that is effectively squelched by locking potentially entrepreneurial people into corporate jobs in order to maintain health insurance cover for themselves and their families.

    Yeah...that's the ticket...robber barons.

    (Thanks to my friend, Obey, for the link to Lynn & Longman’s piece and my friend, Ecrive, for the link to the wsj piece.)

    Posted at 07:47 AM in Current Affairs, Economics, Ethics, Finance, Health |

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    rjs

    maxine, you might enjoy the take of blogger & street veteran yves smith on this short video clip; she blames the crisis on bad economic theory...

    http://watch.bnn.ca/squeezeplay/march-2010/squeezeplay-march-5-2010/#clip273157

    she comes on at about 3:30, after a jobs report recap...

    Posted by: rjs | 03/06/2010 at 08:12 AM

    Maxine Udall (girl economist)

    THANK you, rjs. It's interesting how Salmon attempted to belittle her well-articulated message by the hyperbolic statement about "evil" MF, rather than engage the substance of her argument.

    I'm adding Yves to my list of women we should have listened to or that we should listen to now (along with Brooksley Born, Sheila Bair, and Elizabeth Warren). :-)

    Posted by: Maxine Udall (girl economist) | 03/06/2010 at 09:23 AM

    rjs

    im pleased to be able to connect you to yves, maxine...i consider her blog to be indispensable to my aggregation; i have the link to naked capitalism right next to economists view on my toolbar, and usually visit both before breakfast every morning...

    Posted by: rjs | 03/07/2010 at 12:45 PM

    rjs

    maybe youve seen this already, but i just found it; elizabeth warren on charlie rose:

    http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/10895#frame_top

    Posted by: rjs | 03/07/2010 at 06:47 PM

    Maxine Udall (girl economist)

    Thanks, rjs. I did see it. Also have added naked capitalism to my finance links on the right. (Don't know why it wasn't there before. I check it pretty regularly. The day job really interferes. :-) )

    Posted by: Maxine Udall (girl economist) | 03/08/2010 at 01:19 PM

    The comments to this entry are closed.

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