Friday 30 November 2012

End November Links

Hurricane hits 'just-in-time' economy & When the hoarding equilibrium sets in - couple of interesting posts on hurricane Sandy
The case for electronic money: The end of inflation and the end of recessions - negative interest rates! Quote: "And as a society, we shouldn’t want money to be a good store of wealth over the long haul: we need people to put their wealth to work, either directly or indirectly building companies to help the economy to grow, not burying piles of paper in the sand." Brilliant.
Fasullo and Trenberth Find Evidence in Clouds for High Climate Sensitivity & Solar storm as desert plan to power Europe falters - the worst news I've read recently...
Murphy's Law - Noah Smith takes on Tom Murphy's exponential economist meets finite physicist post (I did this months ago)

Thursday 1 November 2012

End October Links

Welcome back, McArdle, Will American innovation slow if we go "cuddly"? & Acemoglu and Robinson versus the blogs - interesting debate on how global innovation rate could change if America became more social democratic [e.g. does pharmaceutical innovation, which Sweden benefits from, depend on high payments from America's private healthcare sector?], rounded off with Noah Smith's devasting summary of the scientific method in economics. Instinctively I'm with Mark Thoma & Noah Smith on this.
Is unlimited growth a thing of the past? - more comment on the Robert Gordon slow growth paper, this time from Martin Wolf 
Hard money and gerontocracy - Noah Smith describes an interesting paper relating monetary policy to demographics
Why we have to win -  I wanted to keep this blog economics focused, and never intended to link to pro-independence polemics (whether I agree or not). So my continued linking to WoS pieces must be viewed in this light: another excellent piece, strong on the economic history of Britain since 1979, which chimes with my views that ending the Right-To-Buy is the SNP's finest achievement (I wish they'd also endorse a land value tax and explicitly support a higher revenue base for Scottish public services though - legislation this week to reduce empty properties discount on business rates is a move in the right direction though).
So far so good: the global carbon sink in 2011 - this is the best news I've seen for a while...
Small is beautiful - Link to Robert Barro's classic article that started the optimal country size literature.
What explains poor growth in UK? The IMF thinks it's fiscal policy - and the multiplier is big!
Things that aren't bubbles - clear and concise
Framing worker democracy - this contains a very disturbing statistic for our long term well-being: "Capitalists have largely ceased to be providers of capital.For most of the last ten years, non-financial firms, in aggregate, have retained more in profits than they have spent on capital equipment. And except for the recapitalization of banks, net share issuance has been small or negative in recent years."
What do people mean by helicopter money? - I still think Wren-Lewis is missing the distributive differences between helicopter money and QE+Fiscal Policy, but this is a good clear post.
Does the "Entrepreneurship Subculture" prevent big ideas? -  interesting: another mechanism for increasing returns from interaction & agglomeration not to suck us into a black hole of prosperity; and another contributor to `Great Stagnation' type theories.