Merry Christmas from all of us at TVHE. As you may have seen, James has already sorted Christmas Cards for you.
Avoid time inconsistent social choices this Christmas. I am not just talking about eating and drinking too much – also avoid telling that relative you don’t really like how you really feel! And if you’ve been drinking, and don’t think you have the willpower to keep your mouth shut, just think about us.
What can I say, we’re economists and so we deeply care 🙂
On being challenged over an evasive answer in a Committee hearing, Carney quips:
I didn’t get to my position by being overly precise when I didn’t need to be.
Yet bloggers spend much of their time proffering opinions on questions nobody is asking.
Yesterday the Fed pirouetted neatly, simultaneously beginning to taper its quantitative easing and suggesting that policy will not tighten until well beyond its guidance threshold for unemployment. The sum impact has been a loosening of policy but what interested me is the sequencing of its actions.
Read more
Brad Delong on the upcoming translation of the Piketty book (and the recent presentations about it). This is interesting stuff, and is very “economic historyesque” in its description.
I’d note that the general idea that we could have significant wealth accumulation leading to “impatient” groups being poorer in the long-run is accepted, and directly taught, in economics. However, when it is down to a “preference for patience” the normative implications are not quite as clear.
Understanding these heterogeneous “preferences”, what they represent, and what they contribute within the data, is pretty exciting stuff!
Christmas is a time when economists are wheeled out to proclaim the benefits of giving cash. Of course, we’re not really that out of touch as a discipline and The Atlantic has sought to set the record straight. Drawing on the wealth of economists’ writing on gifts and relationships it has created some heart-warming cards that demonstrate our understanding. As it says,
In some cases, non-pecuniary values are important.
H/T: agnitio
Recently I’ve been talking a bundle about inequality in incomes, and fitting it within an idea of “equity”. However, as we’ve chatted about, policy choices often involve conceptualising an equity vs efficiency trade-off. A fundamental part of how we understand where we are in relation to this trade-off, especially with reference to “efficiency”, comes from thinking about productivity.
With this in mind, the Productivity Commission has been thinking about New Zealand’s productivity performance. And given that along many characteristics New Zealand and Australia are similar they have decided that looking into the productivity gap between these countries helps us to understand this issue. This led them to release a working paper titled “Investigating New Zealand-Australia productivity differences: New comparisons at industry level” on their main site (links can be found here).
