July 2012
54 posts
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Milton Friedman: Celebrating His 100th Birthday...
Power of the Market: The Pencil
Milton Friedman on the Basis of the Free Market (Consumer sovereignty)
Milton Friedman on Printing Money (A great deal at 29 seconds)
Milton Friedman on Public Education (Not about vouchers, but about the condescension behind public education.)
Persuasion vs. Coercion (The importance of giving people the chance to hear intellectually diverse viewpoints.)
Free...
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Mark Thoma on the Politicization of Stabilization...
Mark Thoma has a new post “Starving the Beast in Recessions” that links to his article in the Fiscal Times: “How GOP Lawmakers have the Fed Over a Barrel.” Mark’s post backs up the concern I expressed in “Preventing Recession-Fighting from Becoming a Political Football” that traditional stimulative fiscal policy—tax cuts or increases in goverment...
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Government Purchases vs. Government Spending →
I am going to use my blog heavily in teaching my “Principles of Macroeconomics” class this Fall. So I will be posting things I think might be useful for teaching. The link is to a post by Donald Marron that has a great graph of
government purchases (=government spending on goods and services)
total government spending (including transfers and interest on the debt)
as percentages of...
Google Search Hints →
I haven’t yet figured out how to get Tumblr to give me a general search box. So far I have only been able to find a tag-only search box. In the meanwhile, this link is to the best explanation of Google search hints I have seen. I am posting it here partly so I can easily find it again myself. The hint for searching within a blog like this is as follows. If you wanted to search for...
"It Isn't Easy to Figure Out How the World Works"...
Larry Summers
Update to my post “Dr Smith and the Asset Bubble”: Ever since I wrote this post I have been wracking my brain trying to remember whether Larry Summers told me “It isn’t easy to understand how the world works” as in an earlier version of this post, or “It isn’t easy to figure out how the world works.” At first, I dismissed “figure out” because that is a favorite phrase...
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Things are Getting Better: 3 Videos
Slide from Alex Tabarrok’s TED talk “How Ideas Trump Crises”
Steven Pinker: “A Brief History of Violence”
Hans Rosling: “200 Years That Changed the World: 200 Countries, 200 Years, 4 Minutes”
Alex Tabarrok: “How Ideas Trump Crises”
Please share your favorite online videos related to economics, human progress, and other themes of...
Adam Smith as Patron Saint of Supply-Side...
One of the pictures of Adam Smith in wikipedia
I am thinking about adopting Adam Smith as patron saint of Supply-Side Liberalism. As a Unitarian-Universalist and teleotheist (see my post “Teleotheism and the Purpose of Life”), for me “saint” means much the same thing as “hero”: someone who makes the world a better place in a notable way. However, it would do...
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Charles Hill: The Empire Strikes Back →
Robert Pollock did this excellent interview with Charles Hill for the Wall Street Journal’s weekend edition. In this interview (which is all I know about Charles Hill) Charles is saying the kinds of things I wish I knew enough—and were articulate enough—about history and foreign policy to say. So this interview will give you a good idea of my foreign policy views.
By the way,...
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Charles Murray: Why Capitalism Has an Image...
An example of Capitalism’s image problem
I tweeted that this Wall Street Journal column by Charles Murray is a “must read.” I would be tempted to quote more, but let me devote my fair use exception to this passage giving Charles Murray’s view of the moral basis of Capitalism. This should be enough to motivate many of you to read the original column:
The U.S. was...
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Adam Ozimek: What "You Didn't Build That" Tells Us...
Mexican immigration
Adam Ozimek has a new post agreeing with my take on immigration in my post “You Didn’t Build That: American Edition.” He begins:
University of Michigan economist Miles Kimball has a novel and important and take on President Obama’s “You Didn’t Build That” statement and the ensuing debate.
What Adam adds is to the moral case that I make is to point out...
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Milton Friedman's Thermostat: An Econometric... →
I am posting this link to Nick Rowe’s post on “Milton Friedman’s thermostat” because I teach a bit of econometrics in my “Monetary and Financial Theory” class as part of teaching about statistical objects that matter for finance such as variances and covariances. I saw this thanks to Matt Yglesias’s tweet.
Milton Friedman’s thermostat is an...
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Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal →
First frame of one of my favorites
Smartest cartoons I have ever seen. I think many of my loyal readers will like them, and end up smarter while rolling on the floor laughing. Here is one (illustrated above) that touches on a theme I am working on: how to harness the motives people have other than pure self-interest to reduce the size of tax distortions. Of course, anything we do to make a...
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How the Mormons Became Largely Republican →
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The Euro and the Mark
The Brandenburg Gate in Berlin
Ken Griffin and Anil Kashyap are calling for Germany to reintroduce the Mark and leave the common currency of the Eurozone. Although it may not at first be obvious, having Germany leave the Eurozone is in important respects equivalent to the proposal I talked about in my post “The Euro and the Mediterano.” There I tentatively proposed splitting the...
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Will Mitt's Mormonism Make Him a Supply-Side...
The Book of Mormon: Another Testament of Jesus Christ
In my post “Rich, Poor and Middle-Class” I made this statement on my own behalf, as a statement of what I believe Supply-Side Liberalism suggests as the right attitude in response to class warfare in the U.S. context:
I am deeply concerned about the poor, because they are truly suffering, even with what safety net exists....
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Teleotheism and the Purpose of Life
Deep field image from the Hubble space telescope
I am a lay Unitarian-Universalist preacher. Since 2005 I have given a sermon every year at the Community Unitarian-Universalists of Brighton congregation. This is a sermon I gave on March 30, 2008. Please give this sermon a try. I think it has much in it that will be of interest to a wide range of readers: philosophy, cosmology, evolutionary...
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Milan Kundera on the Contribution of Novels to the...
Reblogged from Mills Baker’s blog “meta is murder”:
“Suspending moral judgment is not the immorality of the novel; it is its morality. The morality that stands against the ineradicable human habit of judging instantly, ceaselessly, and everyone; of judging before, and in the absence of, understanding. From the viewpoint of the novel’s wisdom, that fervid readiness to judge is...
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The Most Conflicted Review I Have Received →
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My First Radio Interview on Federal Lines of...
Proposed Federal credit card (illustration from Detroit Metro Times article)
Bill Greider’s piece in The Nation’s blog on Federal Lines of Credit (see “Bill Greider on Federal Lines of Credit: ‘A New Way to Recharge the Economy”) was syndicated to the Detroit Metro Times (the link under the credit card), which in turn sparked a radio interview with Detroit Public...
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The Time Miles was Called a "Neoliberal Sellout"... →
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You Didn't Build That: America Edition
Statue of Liberty
Before Barack said
Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business—you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen
with an intonation pattern that was a little confusing given his likely intent, he said this:
Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive.
It is good to...
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Ezra Klein: "Does Teacher Merit Pay Work? A New... →
Matthew Yglesias: "Miles Kimball on Potential... →
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Magic Ingredient 1: More K-12 School
Photo from “Is KIPP the Answer for Twin Cities Schools,” Minnesota Public Radio
In my book, the two truly wonderful things Barack has done on the domestic front are advancing gay rights (through ending “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” and more recently by rhetorical support for gay marriage rights) and advancing education reform through the brilliant work of Arne...
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Preventing Recession-Fighting from Becoming a...
Wilson F1005R NCAA Leather Official Football
Mike Konczal has a recent post “Four Issues with Miles Kimball’s ‘Federal Lines of Credit’ Proposal,” announced by this tweet:
New post, where I go feral on@mileskimball, discussing four issues with his “Federal Lines of Credit” policy idea.
Mike’s tweet is the only way I can get a working link to his post....
Reply to Matthew Yglesias: What to Do About a...
Graph from Matthew Yglesias’s post
Matthew Yglesias asks in his post today what a country is supposed to do about a housing boom:
Ever since American house prices started declining, people who predicted that this would happen have been crowing and slagging policy elites who failed to see it coming. I think in some ways the better question is what are you supposed to do about these...
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Dr. Smith and the Asset Bubble
Dr. Noah Smith of Noahpinion, soon Assistant Professor at Stony Brook
I sometimes hear professors (including myself) bemoan our lack of power. Then I remind them that we have the amazing power to mint A’s—a power many undergraduates would love to have. It is just that in an institution well-constructed to minimize self-interested decisions, one doesn’t get to have the power...
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Adam Ozimek on Worker Voice
Richard Freeman author of What Do Unions Do?
I love Adam Ozimek’s post “How to Improve Working Conditions” It encapsulates very well what I think Adam and I both learned from the work of Harvard Professor Richard Freeman—especially his influential book What Do Unions Do? Richard Freeman says that unions have two effects:
Unions raise wages and benefits above what the...
Paul Romer's Reply and a Save-the-World Tweet
Honduran fishing village
I sent an email to Paul Romer to let him know about my post giving kudos to his idea of Charter Cities. Here is his reply, which I share with you with his permission. (Note: Paul’s links, unlike mine, stay in the same window, so use the backarrow to return instead of closing the window.)
Miles, good to hear from you. Thanks for the kind words.
Surprisingly to...
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Miles Kimball and Brad DeLong Discuss Wallace...
Brad DeLong, one of the pioneers of the economics blogosphere
Brad and I had a very interesting Twitter discussion last night that I have storified here at this link.
Let me provide a glossary for this discussion, in order of appearance terms that might be less familiar to some readers. But having written what is below, it is clear to me that it is more than a glossary. It has my most...
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Paul Romer on Charter Cities
Paul Romer’s TED talk on Charter Cities
As I mentioned on Twitter, I have often thought that if instead of going to graduate school in economics from 1983-1987, I had gone to graduate school just a few years later, I would have been a growth theorist, like my only slightly younger fellow Mankiw research assistant and coauthor David Weil, who was a graduate student in economics 1985-1990....
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What to Do When the World Desperately Wants to...
A lion and a lamb, lying down together
Karl Smith has a recent post “Why is the US Government Still Collecting Taxes?: Should Lambs Lay Down with Lions Edition” arguing that we should be dramatically reducing tax collection because interest rates on government bonds are so low that, after correcting for inflation, every dollar in the national debt is shrinking over time....
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Corporations are People, My Friend
Video of Mitt Romney saying “Corporations are people”
The title is one of my cousin Mitt’s most famous quotations. This statement has not served him well politically, but I want to agree with him. There are two potential meanings of this statement, and I want to agree with both:
When the government taxes a corporation, the tax ultimately falls on some human being.
When a...
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Will the Health Insurance Mandate Lead People to...
Louis Eeckhoudt (picture from when he visited National Chengchi University)
I am here in Toulouse, in the south of France (not far from Spain), at a conference on “Risk and Choice.” The conference is in honor of Louis Eeckhoudt, my good friend and beloved coauthor, who is also a good friend and beloved coauthor of many, many people who do research on the economics of risk and the...
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Bill Greider on Federal Lines of Credit: "A New...
Bill Greider with Bill Moyers, July 18, 2008 (video)
In my second post, “Getting the Biggest Bang for the Buck with Fiscal Policy,” I wrote about my interview with Bill Greider and promised I would let you know when his article came out. Bill Greider is national affairs correspondent for The Nation, and the author of Secrets of the Temple, a history of the Federal Reserve. And at...
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Reply to Mike Sax's Question "But What About the...
Russell B. Long, Louisiana Senator 1948-1987
Mike Sax writes about my exchange with Karl Smith, starting with my post “Why Taxes are Bad,” Karl Smith’s reply “Miles Kimball on Taxing the Rich” and finally my post “Rich, Poor and Middle-Class.” He has at least three different lines of questions. In this post I want to answer two that might be summarized as “But what about the demand side,...
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Tyler Cowen Reminisces about Our Days in Graduate...
Tyler Cowen of Marginal Revolution
Because I was packing and in the air over the Atlantic yesterday on my way to Toulouse, I only now had a chance to read Tyler Cowen’s wonderful reminiscences of our time together in graduate school and the people we knew. He has some very kind words about me, my daughter Diana, and this blog that warm my heart. Tyler also reminisces about our classmates...
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Miles's April 9, 2006 Unitarian Universalist...
Rainbow chalice, a symbol of Unitarian Universalism
If you have been reading this blog, it won’t surprise you to learn that I am a preacher. I grew up a Mormon. (Indeed, my grandfather, Spencer Woolley Kimball, was the 12th President of the Mormon Church, from 1973 to his death in 1985. That puts him in a line of Mormon Prophets that begins with Joseph Smith and Brigham Young.) In the...
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Brad DeLong and Joshua Hausman on Federal Lines of...
World War I veterans in 1920, who later had the chance to borrow against their bonus
Brad Delong not only praises Federal Lines of Credit, he managed to identify some empirical evidence that suggests they should indeed be more powerful than tax rebates! Here is what he says:
The interesting thing is that we have done this before. In 1931 and 1936 the Congress (over the objections of...
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Rich, Poor and Middle-Class
Mitt Romney when he said “I’m not concerned about the very poor…”
Today I want to react to my friend Karl Smith, to my cousin Mitt Romney, and to the part of the American electorate Mitt was trying to pander to when he said:
I’m not concerned about the very poor — we have a safety net there. If it needs repair, I’ll fix it. I’m not concerned about the very rich —...
Miles's Best 7 "Save-the-World" Posts, as of July...
Surface of Venus—an illustration to “Fiscal Armageddon”
There is a hint of gentle self-mockery in my title above, since I am not blind to my station in the world, which makes it hard for me to sway the policies of governments, central banks, or even economics departments. Indeed, one of my first papers, “Optimal Advice for Monetary Policy” (with Susanto Basu, Greg...
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Dissertation Topic 3: Public Savings Systems that...
New York Stock Exchange
QUESTION: Miles, I am a 2nd year Phd student at the University of Athens,Greece and i would like to write a strong proposal to continue the Phd abroad (I don’t think you need details about why, just read the headlines!). I was reading your papers about precautionary savings and i was thinking to study the impact of social security on savings and investment behavior...
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Miles's Linguistics Master's Thesis: The Later...
Carillon at BYU
In between receiving a 1982 bachelor’s degree and a 1987 Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard, I received a 1984 Master’s degree in Linguistics from Brigham Young University (completed in the Summer after I had already done a year towards an Economics Ph.D.) Here is a download of my Master’s thesis (advised by John Robertson), which has a title longer than some of...
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Miles's Presentation at the Federal Reserve Board...
Here is a download of the Powerpoint file for the presentation I gave at the Federal Reserve Board on May 14, 2012, as recounted in my second post “Getting the Biggest Bang for the Buck in Fiscal Policy.” It had an element of discussing Stefan Nagel’s longer presentation immediately before, a presentation based in part on his paper with Ulrike Malmendier “Depression Babies: Do Macroeconomic...
Dissertation Topic 2: Multisector Models
McDonald’s Car
QUESTION: Hi Miles. I am a PhD student just commencing the thesis writing process. I have been focussing on the literature that has evolved from your paper ‘Sticky Price Models and Durable Goods’. Much of the work following this paper focusses on solving the co-movement problem between durable and non-durable consumption with sticky prices, sticky wages...
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Jobs
United States Joint Services Color Guard on parade at Fort Myer, Virginia
Jobs and the nature of work are central to the issues I laid out in my first post “What is a Supply-Side Liberal?” I am prompted to write about jobs and the nature of work today by the interesting debate about giving up freedom to get and keep a job kicked off by Chris Bertram, Corey Robin and Alex Gourevitch...
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A Review from Modeled Behavior, "The Hive Mind of... →
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Dissertation Topic 1: Federal Lines of Credit...
A Depiction of “The Miracle of the Seagulls” from Mormon History
QUESTION. Miles, I greatly enjoy your blog. I am 3rd year econ phd with a burgeoning interest in the impact of fiscal policy and government expenditure during recessions. Much of the literature simply attempts to calculate a jobs or GDP multiplier, but there are many other impacts of fiscal policy. What are...
A Note for Graduate Students in Economics Looking...
In addition to using the “Ask me anything” button for substantive economic questions, I encourage any of you who are graduate students looking for Ph.D. dissertation topics to send me a detailed description of what kinds of things you are interested in (research preferences), and I will try to think of research topics that I think are important within the range of things you are...
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Is Taxing Capital OK?
The “Dark Satanic Mills” that Made England Rich
QUESTION. Hi Miles. As an English Literature Graduate with wider interests and intro Economics Classes, I wanted to ask you about something I read recently. Ostensibly, Joseph Stiglitz in his new book talked of a world where movement of labour was unimpeded, and cities and countries competed for the best workers;something that...
