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China as a “currency manipulator” in a Donald Trump administration
In his “Contract with the American voter”, Donald Trump pledged to “direct the Secretary of the Treasury to label China a currency manipulator”. Though Trump would likely have some degree of...
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A question about free trade.
As I understand it, free trade ideology became prominent in a world where the most obvious barriers to the realization of comparative advantages were between not within borders. Since then, income...
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Liberty and migration.
Many libertarians support relaxed immigration. I don’t wish to argue for or against any particular policy – or even suggest that a liberty-oriented framework is right for this question to begin with –...
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It’s not easy to interpret voting data.
I’m writing this in the context of numerous takes on the implications of Hillary Clinton’s clear victory in the national popular vote, and more generally other “data-driven” analyses of electoral...
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Bilateral treaties and heuristics for a sane tax regime.
The United States is party to a number of international tax treaties adapted to prevent double taxation of the same income. At first pass, it seems reasonable that we offset a citizen’s income tax...
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Measures of inflation are probably very wrong.
Economists suggest that increases in nominal income partially reflect higher prices for goods and services, a phenomenon more commonly known as inflation. Wikipedia defines inflation as, a sustained...
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More on the inflation puzzle.
I recently explained why I thought price level estimates may not be as useful as the ideal price index is in economic theory. Although theoretical treatments of the price level do consider...
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And the weak suffer what they must?
This title is borrowed from Yanis Varoufakis’ polemic against European austerity. I haven’t read very much of his book, and this post isn’t about European macroeconomic policy at all. Rather, I want...
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What are real assets?
A number of economic analyses focus on changes in ownership between real and financial assets. By way of example, Blackrock wrote a report last year titled “The Ascent of Real Assets”, suggesting that...
View ArticleDeus ex machina and recent articles about genetic bases of human behavior
David Reich’s new book about the ancestral origins of human populations and separately an MIT Technology Review article which names a website that essentially turns 23andme data into what looks like an...
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