Miles Kimball and Noah Smith on Job Creation →

This short Twitter discussion with Noah about “job creation” came out of his reading of “Rich People Do Create Jobs: 10 Tweets” In our discussion, we identified 4 senses in which rich people or entrepreneurs can create jobs (that is, increase labor demand) in companies they fund or lead. In this discussion, I was thinking of labor demand warranted by the extra output the firm will be able to produce if it has another hour of a worker’s effort. Economists call that extra output from another work-hour the marginal product of labor.

  1. Putting in time and effort to organize the firm’s activities in a way that raises the marginal product of a worker.
  2. Taking risks that could turn out badly for the entrepreneur or rich person, but could also turn out well and then have the potential to raise the marginal product of a worker.
  3. Providing funding from their savings that makes machines, factories, training, brand-awareness, or some other form of capital for the firm possible–all of which raise the marginal product of labor.

In addition, members of the government who make wise decisions about economic policy can be said to create jobs.  

In our discussion, we talk about three possible ways an entrepreneur or rich person might approach risk and uncertainty:

  1. In a fully rational way, which I call “Bayesian”.
  2. In a way that is especially averse to uncertain situations where the odds are hard to know. This is called “ambiguity aversion” or aversion to “Knightian uncertainty.” Many economic theorists (both abstract theorists and applied theorists) are interested in ambiguity aversion these days.
  3. In an overoptimistic or overconfident way.

Noah makes what I think is an unwarranted leap that the combination of ambiguity aversion and overconfidence is similar in its effects to being a rational and sensible Bayesian with no ambiguity aversion. Or at least that is how I interpret his word “exactly.”

There is one technical error in our discussion. When there is too much capital, it is possible that more capital could be a bad thing overall, since keeping the capital stock up in the face of depreciation costs more than what the capital produces (the gross marginal product of the capital). But even in that situation, extra capital normally raises the value of having extra labor. The extra capital is a bad thing, but less of a bad thing if there is more labor, so the extra capital raises labor demand. 

Update: Isomorphismes tweeted a link to this wonderful article about the principle that it is the consumption of the rich we should worry about, not their income or wealth:

Tyler Cowen on My Little Brother Jordan's Wisdom →

Tyler Cowen likes my younger brother Jordan Andrew Kimball’s plan to have free clinics for all we can afford as a nation and have people pay for the rest themselves. I talk about this plan in “Miles Kimball and Noah Smith on Balancing the Budget in the Long Run.” In one of the storified tweets, I write: 

I have to credit my brother Jordan Kimball, a radiologist, for the proposal of free clinics for all we can afford, no more.

I hope I have defended and fleshed out my brother Jordan’s plan in a way he would approve.

Note: My wife Gail and I named our son Jordan Matthew Kimball (who is now an undergraduate at Ohio State University studying economics) after my brother Jordan and her father Matthew Cozzens.

Isomorphismes on Enclosures →

Click on the title or here for a fascinating post by isomorphismes about the isolation caused by the way we conceive of real estate in our culture. There are great pictures and a BBC audio link, too.

I had no idea that so recently people roamed about each other’s land, no fences dividing the farms and folds.

The modern structure of towns, like so many things, is an outcome of economic structure.

  • When shepherds no longer roamed freely through the hills
  • and it became efficient for homes to be built in a rotary array around some kind of centre,
  • then pubs (public houses = free houses) became the meeting place

This is one of the most influential things I’ve heard, period. Think about how much longer you have to walk and how much lonelier life became once you don’t cut across another person’s land.

My pessimistic image of the culture that I live in is

  • city people all in their separate flats, with their separate computers, or separate televisions, on separate couches, alone in the space they’ve paid for with the career they fought to dominate
  • going out to a restaurant, pub, or coffee shop to experience the unexpected bumpings into people
  • so everything costs money. It costs money to have friends, costs money to hang out, costs money to flirt, costs money to meet people, costs money to put yourself in a place where people will happen to encounter you–unless you do it over the internet–and then people wonder why nobody makes friends after college…
  • suburban people the same, except also having their own pools instead of sharing a few community pools
  • having their own medium-sized lawns – big enough to keep the neighbours from peeping in the window, or seeing you on the porch and say hello – instead of sharing a large park cutting all the medium lawns down to small lawns (not that they individually choose this – the decision is made by real estate developers)
  • country people even more isolated because land tracts are so huge
  • and nobody, but nobody, knows their neighbours.

Miles Kimball and Noah Smith on Balancing the Budget in the Long Run →

Not surprisingly, a lot of our discussion ends up revolving around health care.

Update: Matt Yglesias, Stephen Bronars, Matt Stambaugh, Tyler Cowen, Modeled Behavior and Jason Becker joined the part of the debate about health care, and I flagged John Cochrane’s excellent suggestions about health insurance. Noah and I also flagged articles about Japan’s current situation, which gives a flavor of the future budget issues the U.S. faces. 

The Matrix and Other Worlds: The Videos

In my post “Teleotheism and the Purpose of Life,” I wrote

There are at least two ways in which the standard scientific worldview is consistent with the possibility of a superbeing.These possibilities are both common themes in hard science fiction.Hard science fiction is science fiction that focuses on things that are genuinely possible given what science we know.One of these hard science fiction themes is reminiscent of traditional Christian theology, while the other is reminiscent of Mormon theology.

Traditional Christian theology, put into a hard science fiction straightjacket, is like the idea that we are all software programs inside a superbeing’s computer.There is no way to know this is not true.If it is true, miracles would just be a special case in the programming.The normal laws of nature could be as simple and regular as they are simply because that was easier than programming more complex laws for the default case.

Mormon theology, put into a hard science fiction straightjacket, is reminiscent of the idea that we are watched over by benevolent aliens from an advanced civilization.Not only is this plausible, it is even possible to argue that it is likely.There are a lot of stars in the Galaxy, but even at a fraction of the speed of light, it would take only a small fraction of the time since the Big Bang to get from one end of the Galaxy to another.If evolution often favors intelligence, why couldn’t intelligent life arise several times in our galaxy?If any intelligent life has arisen before us, chances are it arose many, many millions of years before us, simply because it has been billions of years since the Big Bang.So it is not a big stretch to have aliens from an advanced civilization reach Earth.The big issue would be Fermi’s paradox:“Where are they?”“If they are here, why they are hiding themselves from us?”and whether they are benevolent or not.If they are here, they don’t seem to have destroyed us, which is something.

To me these are important religious questions, but science fiction is not always recognized for the serious theological speculation that it often is.

I found some excellent videos on these speculations, which have some great graphics. The first is about the possibility that we are inside God’s computer. The other three are about the possibility of intelligent aliens. 

  1. Are We Just Simulations? Through the Wormhole: Episode 1
  2. Are We Alone? Through the Wormhole: Episode 6
  3. A Solution to the Fermi Paradox
  4. Alien Planet: Full Documentary

(wikipedia’s definition of the Fermi paradox is: "The Fermi paradox (or Fermi’s paradox) is the apparent contradiction between high estimates of the probability of the existence of extraterrestrial civilization and humanity’s lack of contact with, or evidence for, such civilizations.[1]“)

The Paul Ryan Tweets →

In honor of Paul Ryan being chosen as Mitt Romney’s running mate–a big event no matter what your political leanings–here is a record of a Twitter discussion I had about Paul on July 27, some handicapping in the last few days of whether he would be Mitt’s pick, and my selection from the Twitter traffic about Paul today. The other participants are Noah Smith, Adam Sulewski, Matt Bruenig, Matt O'Brien, Mike Konczal, Casey Thormahlen, and indirectly, Howard Gleckman, Ezra Klein, Andrew Levine, Mike Sax, Jonathan Bernstein, Matt Williams, John Podhoretz, Betsey Stevenson, Josiah Neeley, Matt Stambaugh, Evan Soltas and Brad DeLong among others.

Don’t miss the discussions of long-run fiscal policy and health care. The video of Paul begging Congress to pass the bank bailout (TARP) that I link to at the end shows that he met an important test of seriousness. The bank bailouts are not popular now, but they were necessary in order to avoid a much worse economic outcome than the scathing economic outcome that we have actually had.   

In my mini-bio at the sidebar, it says

Politically, Miles is an independent who grew up in an apolitical family. He holds many strong opinions—open to revision in response to cogent arguments—that do not line up neatly with either the Republican or Democratic Party. 

In these Twitter discussions, you will see me considering and responding to arguments and coming out of the discussions in a different place than where I entered them–on several dimensions.   

To untangle the different discussion threads, I had to depart from chronological order.

Rich People Do Create Jobs: 10 Tweets →

This is my answer to a TED talk by Nick Hanauer, “Rich people don’t create jobs.” In the context of his TED talk, “rich people” means “entrepreneurs.” You can see my 10 tweets here, as well as by clicking on the title of this post. Let me explain a little background on a couple of these tweets.

  1. It is when rich people consume that they use resources for themselves. If they save and invest their money, they are influencing how resources are deployed, but not using those resources up. If they give their money away, then the choice is in the hands of those they give the money to. If it is to their children, let’s hope their children also save and invest or give most of the money away so that they don’t use too many resources on themselves.
  2. When I say that the efforts of entrepreneurs are complementary with those of other workers, I mean that extra effort by workers in a company produces more additional output the harder the entrepreneur is working to organize things.  
  3. In the short run, higher labor demand leads to more employment, but in the long run, higher labor demand leads mostly to higher wages, not to people working more. This is because, even if people are offered more jobs, there is a limit to how much they want to work. But almost all political rhetoric about labor demand is discussed in terms of “jobs." 
  4. One of my biggest themes on this blog is that despite the ways in which current policy is flailing around, that getting enough aggregate demand is not, in principle a hard problem. The hard thing is to foster the combination of more long-run growth and a fairer long-run distribution of the resources people actually use for themselves by consuming them.
  5. Although having a large middle class providing a market for new goods probably is quite a good thing for technological progress, I think that trying to get a larger middle class by redistributing from the rich to the middle-class would backfire. That’s not the way to do it. What is a good way to bolster the middle class? How about breaking the public quasi-monopoly on education with vouchers and charter schools? Or failing that, how about doing what I propose in "Magic Ingredient 1: More K-12 School.” Also, let me repeat here my statement about rich, poor and middle-class, from my post “Rich, Poor and Middle Class”:

I am deeply concerned about the poor, because they are truly suffering, even with what safety net exists. Helping them is one of our highest ethical obligations. I am deeply concerned about the honest rich—not so much for themselves, though their welfare counts too—but because they provide goods and services that make our lives better, because they provide jobs, because they help ensure that we can get good returns for our retirement saving, and because we already depend on them so much for tax revenue. But for the middle-class, who count heavily because they make up the bulk of our society, I have a stern message. We are paying too high a price when we tax the middle class in order to give benefits to the middle-class—and taxing the rich to give benefits to the middle-class would only make things worse. The primary job of the government in relation to the middle-class has to be to help them help themselves, through education, through loans, through libertarian paternalism, and by stopping the dishonest rich from preying on the middle-class through deceit and chicanery. 

6. Successful entrepreneurs create jobs in their own firms, but also typically destroy jobs in competing firms. That is part of how economic progress happens. We can block this competitive creation of new jobs and destruction of old jobs only at the cost of long-run stagnation. I doubt Nick Hanauer meant to argue for blocking progress in that way.  

7. Outsourcing and offshoring also create jobs. People in other states or other countries getting jobs counts, too. They are human beings, just like us.

"Wallace Neutrality" on wikipedia

Link to the “Wallace Neutrality” article on wikipedia

Two months ago, I proposed a public service project for the readers of this blog, in this post:

A Proposal for the supplysideliberal Community’s First Public Service Project: a wikipedia Entry on “Wallace Neutrality”

Thanks to Fudong Zhang, the wikipedia article on “Wallace Neutrality” is up on wikipedia!

I hope that many of you will try your hand at editing it further. For example, I think it is true that in some models with Wallace neutrality, when the nominal interest rate is already zero, the only way to stimulate the economy by monetary policy is to make people expect higher output gaps in the future, after the economy is no longer at the zero lower bound, as discussed in my post “Should the Fed Promise to Do the Wrong Thing in the Future to Have the Right Effect Now?” If it were possible to pin this point down better theoretically and explain exactly how Wallace neutrality figures into the result, that would be a great addition to the wikipedia article.

For the theoretically inclined, a good place to start in thinking about the “Should the Fed Promise to Do the Wrong Thing in the Future to Have the Right Effect Now?” dilemma is Ivan Werning’s continuous-time model of monetary and fiscal policy at the Zero Lower Bound when Wallace neutrality holds: “Managing a Liquidity Trap: Monetary and Fiscal Policy.” More generally, references to ways in which Wallace neutrality has explicitly or implicitly entered into real-world discussions of monetary policy would be of interest in the article.  

I very much appreciate Fudong’s efforts and am glad to see this project on its way. Let’s not stop here.

The True Story of How Economics Got Its Nickname "The Dismal Science" →

Comments to my post “Dismal Science Humor: 8/3/12” corrected me in my claim that the nickname “the dismal science” was a response to Malthus. It turns out that only the word “dismal” was a response to Malthus.  

David Levy and Sandra Peart tell a more interesting story about Thomas Carlyle’s motives in coining the phrase “the dismal science” in “The True Story of the Dismal Science. Part I: Economics, Religion and Race in the 19th Century.” Carlyle called economics “the dismal science” in response to John Stuart Mill’s arguments against slavery. So the true history of the phrase “the dismal science” means that all economists can answer to the nickname “dismal scientist” with pride.  

Should Everyone Spend Less than He or She Earns?

Question: exjunior asked

I’ve always thought Kant’s categorical imperative was a good guide for ethical behavior. But then I pose the question, should I spend less than I earn? Following Kant, I consider what would happen if everybody spent less than they earn all the time. Insofar as I understand modern macroeconomic theory, the result would be a depression. But spending less than you earn is manifestly a good thing. Has economics proven Kant was wrong?

Answer: I disagree with your statement that “spending less than you earn is manifestly a good thing.” In order to save for retirement, spending less than you earn is a good idea when you are young. But it is totally appropriate for retirees to be spending more than they are currently earning. In the long run, looking past business cycles, retirees spending more than what they earn during their retirement years (as they should) balances out for younger people spending less than what they earn (as they should).  

Fed Transparency and Obscurantism

Question: docstocks asked

As I’m sure you know, the House just passed the ‘Audit the FED’ bill. Putting aside the merits of this bill, which I’m sure is just an attempt by Ron Paul to constrain the FED, what are the reasonable arguments for and against more transparency at the FED?

Answer: In general, I think that more transparency is good, on the grounds that it helps generate discussion of policy that can gradually improve policy. You will generally see me arguing for more transparency. However, in my post “Going Negative: The Virtual Fed Funds Rate Target,” I argued that sometimes, in order to avoid headlines that would generate political heat on the Fed and so possibly compromise Fed independence, it is a good idea for the Fed to provide enough information for people to figure out what it is going to do, but not connect all the dots to say that it will buy yeay many gigadollars or teradollars worth of certain assets. In other words, the Fed should disclose things in a way that makes it very transparent for sophisticated Fed watchers. But in some cases it may be OK for the Fed to say things in a way that is a little obscure for the general public, which have to be explained to them by the journalists covering the Fed. Even for the general public, it can be argued that this is in service of the maximum level of understanding, since the initial impression that the issues are hard to understand and require reading a whole article rather than just a headline is accurate.

In the case of Fed actions during the financial crisis, which involved bailouts, in the end, I think the Fed has to report everything it has done, but if I were at the Fed in charge of that reporting, I would try to do it in a way that would make the most boring headlines possible given the inflammatory content.  

Despite my support for occasional obscurantism to keep political inflammatory dollar figures out of headlines so that people have to actually read the newspaper article to see them, I think the Fed in general should do everything reasonably within its power to help the general public understand monetary policy. On that score, I strongly favor Bernanke’s approach toward explaining monetary policy over Greenspan’s approach.

Big Brother Speaks: Christian Kimball on Mitt Romney

My older brother Chris has been reading my blog. He sent me an email disagreeing with some of what I said in my post “Will Mitt’s Mormonism Make Him a Supply-Side Liberal?” (and in these storified tweets) about Mitt Romney. I thought what he had to say was interesting, and asked him to give me a version that I could post, which he did.

Though Mitt is a hard person to really know, Chris certainly knows Mitt much better than I do. Chris was in the same Mormon congregation as Mitt for a while and interacted with Mitt in that context. (My own limited contact with Mitt occurred when I visited Chris and attended church with him.) In addition, Chris began serving as the ecclesiastical leader of a Mormon congregation in the Boston area not long after Mitt stepped down as head of all the Mormon congregations in the Boston area, and so had a good chance to hear about what Mitt’s church leadership style had been like. 

Local Mormon Church leaders serve while keeping their day jobs–day jobs such as Mitt’s work at Bain Capital and Chris’s work as a tax lawyer and tax law professor. Like ecclesiastical leaders in other denominations, Mormon church leaders spend a significant amount of their time in a “social worker” role, talking to and helping people in trouble. I found what wikipedia had to say about Mitt’s service as head of the congregations in the Boston area illuminating, and consistent with what I have heard from friends in the area:

During his years in business, Romney held several specific positions in the local lay clergy, which generally consists of males over the age of 12.[13] Around 1977, he became a counselor to the president of the Boston Stake.[102] He served as bishop of the ward (ecclesiastical and administrative head of his congregation) at Belmont, Massachusetts, from 1981 to 1986.[103][104] As such, in addition to home teaching, he also formulated Sunday services and classes using LDS scriptures to guide the congregation.[105] He forged bonds with other religious institutions in the area when the Belmont meetinghouse was destroyed by a fire of suspicious origins in 1984; the congregation rotated its meetings to other houses of worship while it was rebuilt.[99][104]

From 1986 to 1994, he presided over the Boston Stake, which included more than a dozen wards in eastern Massachusetts with about 4,000 church members altogether.[68][105][106]He organized a team to handle financial and management issues, sought to counter anti-Mormon sentiments, and tried to solve social problems among poor Southeast Asian converts.[99][104] An unpaid position, his local church leadership often took 30 or more hours a week of his time,[105] and he became known for his tireless energy in the role.[68] He generally refrained from overnight business travel owing to his church responsibilities.[105]

He took a hands-on role in general matters, helping in maintenance efforts in- and outside homes, visiting the sick, and counseling troubled or burdened church members.[103][104][105] A number of local church members later credited him with turning their lives around or helping them through difficult times.[99][104][105] Some others were rankled by his leadership style and desired a more consensus-based approach.[104] Romney tried to balance the conservative dogma insisted upon by the church leadership in Utah with the desire of some Massachusetts members to have a more flexible application of doctrine.[68] He agreed with some modest requests from the liberal women’s group Exponent II for changes in the way the church dealt with women, but clashed with women whom he felt were departing too much from doctrine.[68] In particular, he counseled women not to have abortions except in the rare cases allowed by LDS doctrine, and also in accordance with church policy encouraged single women facing unplanned pregnancies to give up the baby for adoption.[68] Romney later said that the years spent as an LDS minister gave him direct exposure to people struggling in economically difficult circumstances, and empathy for those going through problematic family situations.[107]

I think a reasonable way to intepret this is as more evidence that Mitt is not, at his core, ideological.

It would be very easy for me to be wrong about Mitt. I know that my reading of the Mormon scriptures cited in “Will Mitt’s Mormonism Make Him a Supply-Side Liberal?” –prompted by brilliant church lessons from my other distant cousin, Tony Kimball, in the Boston area–made me more concerned about the poor than I would otherwise be. And my exposure to Mormon political culture predisposed me toward helping the poor in ways that make as little use of the heavy hand of government as possible. I am only guessing where Mitt is coming from.

I think Mitt’s Mormon background provides two other clues to understanding Mitt. First, the Boston area has several of the most liberal congregations in the Mormon Church. (I was an active Mormon when I was attending Harvard as an undergraduate and graduate student.) The kinds of moderate views that Mitt expressed on social issues in his early campaigns would not be unusual views for a highly educated Mormon in the Boston area.

Second, Mormonism has a strong emphasis on honesty in its training of children. I think this early training in honesty has helped make Mitt a bad liar. When he lies, it is often quite obvious. To me, the most dangerous liar is one who is good at it. Mitt is not that. The problem with Mitt’s untruths–in addition to what they say about his character–is that once they are ignored, we have relatively little to go on to figure out what kind of President of the United States he would be.  

This was a longer introduction than I originally intended. Let me at long last give you what my big brother Chris has to say.  Chris cautions that this is his personal opinion. Chris is not representing or speaking for any other person or organization. Chris: 

I think you are wrong about Romney in certain respects. Even though I have no real knowledge of his personal beliefs, what I do know and surmise is somewhat different.

First, on the particular issue of care for the poor, I think the more likely view on his “heart of hearts” true belief is that he cares but believes strongly in a self-help and private help (family, church, private charity) approach with little or nothing from government. To the extent it matters, Mormon patterns and belief in the 20th century trended that way (as contrasted with a communitarian approach in the 19th century). I don’t believe Mormon views (culturally – one can debate the Book of Mormon approach) have ever been consonant with a strong government involvement. The exception might be in a theocratic structure, such as the intermountain West in the State of Deseret period (pre-Utah statehood).
Second, thinking of policy more broadly, I suggest the following breakout is helpful, considering the areas where a U.S. President might have some influence:
1. Domestic Economic
In this arena the president has very little control. Most of what gets done is by and through Congress. Romney might get more done (than Obama) because Republicans in Congress would be less obstructionist, but only if he were moving in the direction that the Republicans want. (Not to say that “getting more done” is an unequivocal good–if it means getting the wrong things done it can be a bad.) In short, whether or not his apparent policy statements in the Domestic Economic arena are his true belief or are pandering, and whether or not they make sense (in my opinion tax and spending is nonsense, so far), he would probably have to live with his statements. The likelihood is that his statements become reality whether (in his “heart of hearts”) he likes it or not.
2. Domestic Human Rights (immigration, gay rights, rights of corporations vs individuals, voting rights, reproductive and other issues affecting women in particular, etc.)
In this arena I think Romney means most of what he says. I suspect that the campaign has forced him to take a somewhat more extreme position than he really believes, but I read that as a matter of degree not direction. To the extent we’re looking for Mormon influences, the modern (21st century) church is a mixed story but the 20th century Mormon views and discourse, that have the most influence on Romney, would be consonant with what he’s saying. And personally, I disagree with just about everything he says and claims in this arena. 
3. Foreign Policy and Defense
This is the arena where the president can really do something, and in many cases almost unilaterally. There is no reason to think that Romney’s history, experience or education has prepared him for foreign policy and defense. In this area Romney seems to be ill informed, lacks any subtlety, and arguably doesn’t even get the policy statements right for the neoconservative audience he is speaking too. Further, to the extent I can extract a policy view from his statements (sometimes substituting or updating country names) my guess is that he means what he says–perhaps a bit naive, but true belief. My own opinion is that those expressed views are not just wrong-headed but frightening in a person who is asking to be Commander in Chief.
I’m very negative on Romney, as you can see. I am positive about Obama, which is a different discussion. That is not anywhere close to a 100% endorsement–he has made a lot of mistakes, but he has also done a lot right. And I trust him particularly in the foreign policy and defense area, which is what I look to first in choosing a President. (In assessing the President’s performance, particularly in the domestic economic arena, I do adjust my expectations by (a) an allowance for an “anything to hurt Obama” obstructionist Republican House, and (b) my belief that the recent recession involves a step-change in housing prices and values, and in employment, the causes and pressures for which have a longer history but which we have experienced as sudden changes from which I do not expect a recovery but rather a new normal.)

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August 6, 2012 Update (Preamble to the August 5, 2012 Legal Notice) 

For those wanting to refer to this blog, a fair use summary or quote plus a link will always be OK, but if you want to do more, read on.

I have been approached by one website interested in putting up enhanced versions of some of my posts on their site, and another interested in doing a Japanese translation of some of my posts. I want to encourage this kind of thing in the near future, but I want to make sure to be able to sign the standard legal documents in a book deal (or online equivalent) down the road.  

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Copyright: Miles Spencer Kimball. Used by permission according to a temporary nonexclusive license expiring June 30, 2013. All rights reserved.

The full reprint would have to be taken down on June 30, 2013, and print copies could not be sold or transferred after that date. The details are below, below the row of asterisks.

I found wrestling with the intellectual property law issues involved in crafting this legal notice interesting. I am not a lawyer, but my father, brother and sister are all lawyers (though not specialists in intellectual property law), which makes me more aware of legal issues than I would otherwise be. I crafted this legal notice myself.

–Miles Spencer Kimball

August 5, 2012, 11:34 AM Eastern Daylight Time

I, Miles Spencer Kimball, author of the content on supplysideliberal.com, currently appearing as the Tumblr blog http://www.tumblr.com/blog/supplysideliberal, am publishing this legal notice. This legal notice supersedes an earlier legal notice relating to reproduction or use of content on this blog: “Notice of Revocable Permission to Reproduce Content from this Blog with Appropriate Attribution to this Blog and Notice of Miles Spencer Kimball’s Copyright.” Nothing in this notice or earlier notices affects people’s right to make fair use of content from this blog, according to the legal doctrine of “fair use.” 

My legal intent is this: in order to promote this blog and its ideas, I want to give permission for people to reproduce and use content from this blog for a window of time beginning now and ending on June 30, 2013, while retaining all the rights necessary for me to be able to promise exclusive use of content from this blog to a publisher or other party I name in the future. Only I, Miles Spencer Kimball, at my sole discretion, have legal authority to extend the date June 30, 2013 after which reproduction or use of content from this blog (beyond legally established fair use) must cease and desist.

At my sole discretion, I, and only I, also have the legal authority to extend this date for some uses of the content of this blog but not for others. This requires specific authorization from me.  (For example, anyone wishing to translate content from this blog to a language other than English and reproduce or use that translation beyond fair use should contact me.)

Three legal issues have come to my attention:

  1. The need to insure that third parties are informed of the limitations I have placed on reproduction or use of content from this blog.  
  2. The need to insure that no one relies on being able to reproduce or use content from this blog after June 30, 2013. 
  3. The need to insure that (a) no one can limit in any way my right to reproduce and use content from this blog that I have authored and (b) no one can limit in any way my right to permit others as I see fit to reproduce and use content from this blog that I have authored.

Therefore, I require that anyone who reproduces or uses content from this blog (beyond fair use) include in an easily visible way the following notice, word for word as it appears in the block quote immediately below:

Copyright: Miles Spencer Kimball. Used by permission according to a temporary nonexclusive license expiring June 30, 2013. All rights reserved.

IN ADDITION, I require that anyone who reproduces or uses content from this blog provide easily visible and clearly identified working links to this blog or the relevant post or posts on this blog, UNLESS they are technologically unable to do so given the form of reproduction or use. I REQUIRE that anyone technologically unable to provide a working link to this blog or its posts must provide in an easily visible way (a) the web address in the following block quote 

http://blog.supplysideliberal.com 

AND (b) the corresponding web address or addresses of the relevant post or posts.

Unless I, Miles Spencer Kimball, duly authorize otherwise, the following steps (among others) must be taken to cease and desist any use (beyond fair use) of content from this blog after June 30, 2013:

  1. At or before midnight, June 30, 2013, all reproductions or uses of content from this blog beyond fair use must be taken down from all websites other than this one.
  2. No print reproduction of content from this blog may be sold or transferred in any way from one party to another after June 30, 2013.  
  3. No electronic file containing content from this blog may be transferred in any way from one party to another after June 30, 2013. (However, until further notice, people may view supplysideliberal.com itself on any device, and RSS feeds may transfer content from a post within 24 hours of its posting, as long as this content is not thereafter transferred from one party to another more than 24 hours after it is posted.)

LIMITATIONS TO THE TEMPORARY NONEXCLUSIVE LICENSE EXPIRING JUNE 30TH, 2012:

LIMITATION 1: The temporary, nonexclusive license I am hereby giving to reproduce and use content from this blog until June 30th, 2012 does NOT extend to anything I write or otherwise create that appears on any other website. It only applies to content taken directly from this website. That is, you must be able to see the content you want to reproduce or use at a web address that begins with the characters     http://blog.supplysideliberal.com   in order for the permission above to apply.  

LIMITATION 2: The temporary, nonexclusive permission I am hereby giving to reproduce and use content from this blog until June 30th, 2012 does NOT extend to any post appearing on this website (including any content in the comments to that post to which I hold copyright) if the post has a notice of exception at the top of the post (above other content but below the title).  

Two notes:

  1. For students, I think it would be especially valuable to send them to this blog itself, because they might click on some economics beyond what is assigned and learn even more!
  2. Limitation 1 means that if I take something down from the website, the temporary nonexclusive permission no longer applies even before June 30, 2012, since you have to be able to take it directly from the most recent version of the website.  Also, in the much more common case of a post that has had some revisions, it means that you need to use the most recent, updated version of a post, taken directly from the current version of the website at the time you need to download.     

Dismal Science Humor: 8/3/12

“Fear the Boom and Bust” a Hayek vs. Keynes Rap Anthem.“

Thomas Robert Malthus and John Stuart Mill inspired Thomas Carlyle to coin the sobriquet "the dismal science” for economics. This nickname has stuck, in part because economists often seem overly serious.  But dismal scientists and others interested in the dismal science have created some economic humor. Unlearning Economics tweeted today a link to this wonderful cartoon about the fact that a large enough Keynesian multiplier would mean that make-work tasks could be a good thing if the economy was in a bad recession and there was no better way to stimulate the economy. 

Kevin McDonald replies to the tweet by recommending the video “Fear the Boom and Bust” a Hayek vs. Keynes Rap Anthem.“  This is a very funny video about two very famous, but unfortunately very dead economists, Friedrich Hayek and John Maynard Keynes (the economist Keynesian economics is named after–there is a debate about whether Keynesian economics accurately represents his thinking). There is also a very funny sequel to this video: "Fight of the Century: Keynes vs. Hayek Round Two.”

I have put a date in this post’s title hoping that more economic humor worth sharing will come my way in the future. Please let me know about any economic humor that tackles your funny bone in the comments.

Grammar Girl: Speaking Reflexively

Mignon Fogarty–a.k.a. “Grammar Girl”–specializes in giving practical online grammar tips in a cheerful, sprightly, non-dogmatic way. I have found Mignon Fogarty’s tips very helpful. Even my coauthors like them. Here are her tips that I have used so far: 

“Like” versus “Such As”

“Like” versus “As”

“Which” versus “That”

Should it be “You” or “Your” with Gerunds?

My number one grammar pet peeve is the overuse of the reflexive pronouns “myself” and “yourself.” I hear this mistake in very high places. I cringe every time. Here is what Mignon,  Grammar Girl, has to say about it:

How to Use “Myself” and Other Reflexive Pronouns

Ontology and Cosmology in 14 Tweets →

Nick Violet asks this (in a link within a link that he called to my attention with a tweet):

…my question to economists or social scientists, or even physicists if interested is: are immaterial infrastructures (like institutions) thermodynamic systems (like the car we talked about) or not? And if yes, or not, why?

Click on the title of this post or here for my answer. This represents what understanding I have of ontology and cosmology from my reading. (Someday I’ll post a list of books I’ve read since 1995.)

A note on the tweet count: Nick Violet’s tweet, representing the question, is 1 of the 14 tweets. Questions are an indispensable part of the road to truth, and deserve credit. Here is an example of the importance of questions in economics:

In my judgment, Ed Prescott fully deserves his Nobel Prize for the questions he asked (including his methods for asking them), though he wouldn’t have deserved a Nobel Prize for his answers.  

(Finn Kydland was there with Ed, asking the questions, and fully deserves his Nobel Prize for asking those questions. But Finn is less associated with Ed’s later answers.)