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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    « Life with (a Businessman) Father | Main | Financial Sector Profits: Taxation Without Represenation? »

    06/21/2010

    Paul Krugman Is Right (As Usual)

    I'm guessing most of my readers have seen this NY Times op-ed by Paul Krugman since Brad Delong and Mark Thoma have both posted it (and y'all probably read Krugman regularly, too). I'm posting it here along with a plea.  Please try to get as many  of your non-econ, non-econ blog reading friends and family as you can to read it. It is really important and it's a good effort to inform the electorate about why deficit hawkery is not the right tack to take now.

    It's too bad in a way that this particular article appears as op-ed. It's opinion, I suppose, in the sense that for all the economists who agree with Krugman, there is some finite number of economists who disagree. But the article is a concise distillation of macro economic theory by someone who is credible and has a better grasp of that theory, particularly as it applies to deep recessions where monetary policy is constricted by the zero interest bound, than many (most?) other economists.

    I also wanted to let those readers who might be interested know that I'll be traveling over the next 10 days or so. Blog posts may be more sporadic than usual, depending on internet access. Thanks for continuing to visit.

    Posted at 09:14 AM in Economics, Ethics, Finance |

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    simon johnson: http://baselinescenario.com/2010/06/22/paul-krugman-for-omb/

    and in the same vein, Katrina vanden Heuvel at the nation: http://www.thenation.com/blog/36521/moment-truth

    Posted by: rjs | 06/23/2010 at 10:44 AM

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