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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    « Trickle Down Meanness | Main | A Conversation About Health Reform »

    07/25/2010

    David Coates on Why Elizabeth Warren Should Head CFPA

    Professor David Coates, Worrell Chair of Anglo-American Studies at Wake Forest University, asks

    So why is the possible appointment of Elizabeth Warren to head the agency whose creation she championed now causing such waves? What unwritten codes might Elizabeth Warren inadvertently have broken?

    He goes on to review and summarize Professor Warren's reports for the Congressional TARP oversight panel as well as a news interview, concluding that

    ...Elizabeth Warren has proved over and over again that she will fight for the full implementation of programs designed to promote the health of Main Street, not just that of Wall Street.... in 2009 she had both the capacity and the courage to turn a small but empowered Oversight Panel into a major watchdog for the interests of ordinary Americans. ...since she has performed that task once, she can legitimately be expected to do it again.

    There is no gain in giving teeth to a watch-dog if the watch-dog will not bite. Elizabeth Warren clearly bites. It is not much fun for those being bitten, but then they shouldn’t have needed biting in the first place. Biting is good when the cause is right. Tim Geithner might not want Elizabeth Warren to head up the Consumer Financial Protection Agency; but the rest of us definitely should.

    Read the full blog here please.

    Posted at 05:45 AM in Current Affairs, Economics, Ethics, Finance |

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