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Growth looks likely to be lower than budget predictions
ECONOMICS:The upturn has been stronger than expected, resulting in a recent spate of upward revisions to growth forecasts, writes PAT McARDLE
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How Would You Like to Die?
How can we die well? This is the "fundamental question for everyone living in the era of modern medicine," writes surgeon-journalist Atul Gawande in The New Yorker. Budgethawks urge us to face the fact that we can't afford everything.Demagogues shout ...
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Tenure in a Nutshell
Imagine a setting where you care about performance (e.g. a professional football team, or a currency trader). You wouldn't think of granting tenure. So why do it in academics? ~ Steven Levitt "Lifetime drycleaning"? "Permanent tax advisor"? ...
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Kling: Thoughts on Academic Tenure
(July 27, 2010 09:20 AM) Megan McArdle writes, When an academic starts pushing the tenure model for anywhere outside academia, I will find their defense of its use in academia more convincing. I think that tenure is only a subset or symptom of a larger...
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Richard (RJ) Eskow: Elizabeth Warren and Her Discontents
Somebody really, really doesn't want Elizabeth Warren to run the new Consumer Protection Financial Bureau, or "CFPB," which she first envisioned and proposed. Who? The big banks, for sure, as well as others who don't want their misbehavior brought to ...
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Should Employers Check Your Credit Before They Hire You?
There was a great deal of back-and-forth in the left half of the blogosphere this weekend over employers who use FICO scores as a way of weeding out job candidates . In a sort of peculiarly American fashion, our nation seems to have decided that ...
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In Defense of Subprime Auto Lending, But Not of GM
We learned today that General Motors will purchase subprime auto lender Americredit. I share my colleague Megan McArdle's confusion about just why GM feels that this is a smart strategy. It's particularly odd that the government would approve this ...
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Last Call
Interesting post from Henry Farrell on Germany and the debate between Tyler Cowen and Paul Krugman. Most interesting to me is that he seems to agree with me that the actual empirical evidence in favor of stimulus is pretty murky--not a position you ...
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The Little Picture: E-Books Rising.
A customer tries out an e-Book reader at the 2010 Samsung Forum. According to an article in today's Wall Street Journal , Amazon.com has just announced that, for the first time, sales of e-books have outpaced those of hardbacks. Megan McArdle thinks ...
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Just Say No To Extending The Bush Tax Cuts
I'm rather surprised to find Ezra Klein and myself on opposite sides of the temporary tax cut debate. He supports a temporary extension of the Bush tax cuts for those under $250,000 in income:I think that would make sense, actually. You want to ...
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Migrant starts up EOSS open source operation
Recent arrival in NZ is developing open-source integration suite
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&c
-- Ezra Klein and Megan McArdle debate extending the Bush tax cuts.--Arthur Laffer's laughable argument : unemployment benefits cause unemployment--Why is the RNC defending the Tea Party?--A former IMF economist looks at how income inequality fueled ...
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When can you trust an expert?
Ezra Klein made an interesting observation a few days ago about how opinion journalists read papers by experts: [T]his is one of the difficulties with analysis. Fairly few political commentators know enough to decide which research papers are ...
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A Momentary Lapse of Reason
Building a bridge to 1932.
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Things to bring on your honeymoon, and other serious affairs of state
My latest bloggingheads diavlog is with The Atlantic 's newly-betrothed Megan McArdle. The topics covered include Weigelgate, the Rolling Stone story on McChrystal, the Russian spy ring story, whether austerity or deficit spending is the thing to do ...
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MEGAN MCARDLE ON AUSTERITY HORROR: If Ireland hadnt done the austerity budget, it might now be mo
MEGAN MCARDLE ON AUSTERITY HORROR: If Ireland hadnt done the austerity budget, it might now be more like Greecein danger of default without massive intervention from the rest of the European Union. Intervention that might well not be forthcoming
