The Grumpy Economist

An interesting question emerged from some discussion surrounding my last carbon tax post. How big will the tax be? The letter says $40 a to...

The Federal Government seems to be obeying with rather remarkable accuracy the constitutional mandate that the government may not spend mone...

The " Economists’ Statement on Carbon Dividends " in the Wall Street Journal this week is a remarkable document. It's short, s...

An essay at The Hill  on what to make of market volatility, from Dec 31. Now that two weeks have passed, I can post the whole thing. I add s...

How much is the property tax? In Calfornia, we pay 1%  per year. That doesn't seem bad, except that property values are very high. You...

As you may have noticed, I try very hard not to get in to the business of rebutting Paul Krugman's various outrages. The article " ...

George Selgin has a nice piece on TNB and IOER, which I missed when it came out in September, but it's still relevant. (HT a correspo...

Many of us free-market types bemoan how poorly designed regulation hurts economic growth. But unlike "stimulus," regulation is a d...

An essay at The Hill on what to make of market volatility: What’s causing the big drop in the stock market, and the bout of enormous volat...

Scott Sumner has a terrific post on teaching economics . (HT Marginal Revolution) The core ideas of economics are extremely counterintuiti...

Christopher Rufo at the New York Post has an interesting article on homeless problems in Seattle. The analysis rings true of many other are...

A  WSJ oped  with J J Plecs, formerly of  Roam Analytics , which does a lot of health related data work. This is the full oped now that 30 d...

Over the last few weeks we have had a series of discussions at Hoover on the 10th anniversary of the financial crisis and recession. Th...

Corey Garriott, Sophie Lefebvre, Guillaume Nolin, Francisco Rivadeneyra and Adrian Walton at the Bank of Canada have issued a thoughtful and...

Tyler Cowen has a very interesting Bloomberg column on Brexit . Essentially, he views the UK getting this right -- which I agree it does not...

Friday at Hoover we will have a series of events reexamining the lessons of the financial crisis and recession. (There is a public event her...

Tim Taylor, also reviewing Summers on China , makes a few excellent points. Growth comes from within. Trade is not conquest. The formula...

(Continues from my last post on China trade ) Larry Summers has a good  Financial Times oped  on the same subject, titled "Washingto...

I wrote a little commentary on trade for The Hill, which they titled " The US should give China Flowers not Tariffs ." Chocolates ...

I went to the Financing of Innovation summit at Stanford GSB last Thursday. (Sorry, I can't seem to find a full program online.) Here i...