How Little We Know
Greg Mankiw's Blog (Free subscription) | 11/26/2009
Economist Russ Roberts opines on financial reform .
Russ Roberts
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Russ Roberts on "How Little We Know"
Marginal Revolution (Free subscription) | 11/24/2009
The short essay on the financial crisis, and potential remedies, is here and it offers a Hayekian skepticism about many suggested solutions. Excerpt: Attempts to repair the system from the top-down will fail. We must find ways to let bottom-up...
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The Poor Today are Better Off than the Average Person of 1971
Wizbang (Free subscription) | yesterday
I read Cafe Hayek every day, where Russ Roberts and Don Boudreaux, two professors at George Mason University, write on the intersection of economics and politics. Today, Professor Boudreaux points...
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Economists as Enablers
Reboot Congress (Free subscription) | 11/27/2009
Russ Roberts of Cafe Hayek has some observations on the challenges of financial reform : Over the last 15 months, average Americans have sent hundreds of billions of dollars to some of the richest people in human history. The better the citizenry understands this reality, the better chance the political incentives will change. If people don’t understand it, the political incentives...
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The Failure of Capitalism? -- By: Veronique de Rugy
The Corner (Free subscription) | 11/25/2009
If you remember, The Failure of Capitalism is the title of Judge Richard Posner's most recent book. George Mason University's Russ Roberts has a very interesting podcast with Posner in which they talk about what caused the economic crisis. Listen to this conversation and decide for yourself if Posner manages to make a good case for his theory. I think he ignores important factors, such...
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Questions on The Price of Everything
Division of Labour (Free subscription) | 11/25/2009
My econ 101 students have to write a review of Russ Roberts's The Price of Everything this semester. Some questions corresponding to each chapter are below the fold. Comments are open for a few days if you have any suggestions; if you like any of these questions, please feel free to use them....
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The Financial Crisis Narrative, by Arnold Kling
EconLog (Free subscription) | 11/25/2009
... lines of "This Time is Different," if you will. (Speaking of the latter, you can hear Russ Roberts interview Carmen Reinhart in the latest econtalk.) They emphasize across-the-board changes in risk premiums. An impressive array of measures of the risk premium in the financial markets declined significantly leading up to 2006 or 2007 and then soared as the financial crisis...
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Price Discrimination, Again, by Arnold Kling
EconLog (Free subscription) | 11/25/2009
... normally do, then the overhead costs are three times as small. He also cites a 1991 paper from Russ Roberts and John R. Lott that debunked some standard stories of price discrimination. I think that the key issue here is that the cost of many products is dominated by overhead costs, and marginal costs are close to zero. Think of the marginal cost of another airline passenger compared...
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Reinhart on Financial Crises
EconTalk (Free subscription) | 11/23/2009
(November 23, 2009 06:30 AM) Carmen Reinhart of the University of Maryland talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the ideas in her book This Time is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly (co-authored with Kenneth Rogoff). They discuss the role of capital inflows in financial crises, the challenges of learning the right lessons, and what is generally true about financial crises...
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Two good paragraphs
SCSUScholars (Free subscription) | 11/20/2009
... “inefficient” competition among standards. Let different standards vie for attention. Russ Roberts . BTW, I picked up and re-read The Price of Everything last weekend, deciding to use it in a freshman gen ed course this spring. It's better than I remembered. I am really looking forward to that course now.