Posts Tagged With: Economics

Free Trade & Sports

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The idea of protectionism, when applied to a sport like baseball or basketball, is ridiculous. Say the NBA suddenly decided to limit the number of foreign players that could be drafted to four players in the upcoming draft. In the name of "protecting" American players at home. Arguments are made by American players - "they're taking our jobs," "American talent isn't as developed as foreign talent so we need quotas," or my favorite, "Foreign players are better than we are and they will play for less money than we will." This idea is ridiculous - when Dirk Nowitzki, Yao Ming, or Steve Nash play games, the quality of play is better and tickets are cheaper. More fans (I think) would be willing to go see a better quality game, too.

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Carbon Offsets & the Environment

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The Economist has a good post on why carbon offsets aren't a pass for consuming bad energy. I've stopped publicly advocating for environmental change, mainly because I fly a lot and consume lots of energy. My family's home is located about fifteen minutes drive from anything, which I bug my parents about constantly. I will continue to advocate for the Pigou Club, higher carbon taxes, and consumption taxes on our nation's roads.

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Income Inequality

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A lot of debate recently has been focused on the growing income gap in the United States. I am not that peeved by income inequality. Incomes at the top will rise as economies grow and companies become truly global. I am far more concerned if the equality pie is not helping the bottom 10% at all. In my opinion, better to earn 10,000 if the top is earning 1,000,000 than to earn 4,000 if the top is earning 15,000. There's more for everyone to go around, even if the slice is smaller. I would measure economic progress by how much the income of the bottom 10% is rising. However, recent research suggests people might not be happier in the more-for-everyone scenario. Steven Pinker had a great quote in the book How the Mind Works: A society can be fair, free or equal, but not all three. Income inequality strikes at the balance between being fair and being equal. I would propose taxing death more heavily so that funds cannot be easily transferred from one generation to the next. This could help make the country a better meritocracy.

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Why Tariffs Are Silly, and How Economists Think About the World

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From Tim Harford's book The Undercover Economist, which took me about a day to read: "There are two ways for the United States to produce automobiles: they can build them in Detroit, or grow them in Iowa. Growing them in Iowa makes use of a special technology that turns wheat into Toyotas: simply put the wheat on ships and send them out into the Pacific ocean. The ships come back a short while later with Toyotas on them. The technology used to turn wheat into Toyotas out in the Pacific is called "Japan," but it could just as easily be a futuristic biofactory floating off the coast in Hawaii. Either way, auto workers in Detroit are in direct competition with farmers in Iowa. Import restrictions on Japanese cars will help the auto workers and hurt the farmers: they are the modern-day equivalent of "frame breaking."

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Undergraduate Research

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I wrote my Econ 1 professor today and asked her if there were any professors looking for research assistants. She said that professors rarely take undergraduate assistants. Fair enough. Which led me to the idea of having undergraduates form teams based on appealing ideas, and do their own research, maybe led by one or two full-time advising staff. You'd need to set up a large amount of infrastructure to accomplish this, but it has a lot of potential - it works like this: Students submit ideas, other students express an interest in developing the idea, and you form a research team. The adviser is exactly that - to advise on complex economic issues and provide guidance in producing tangible results. This would be useful, I think.

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On Experiential Learning

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Last week I wrote Greg Mankiw and Tyler Cowen, two professors and economics bloggers. I wrote the following:
My name is Kevin Burke and I'm a freshman at the University of Pennsylvania, about to start Econ 001. I know it's important to get an academic background in economics, but I think some of the best learning I've done in most fields has come outside of the classroom. I was wondering if you could tell me about some of the key moments in your intellectual development as an economist, and where these moments took place. My goal here is to figure out how I can supplement my Econ education with real-world schooling. Thanks for reading this.
Because honestly, how often do you learn something because someone just tells it to you? Most people need to see examples, or get out and learn something for themselves (as in, don't touch the stove while it's on, don't touch the stove while it's on, okay, you touched the stove, and you got burned). I got responses in the form of two excellent blog posts. It was really cool to have them write back, and they wrote really useful advice. If you're considering economics, I would recommend you take a look at their lists. I was going to take a year off before school to get some practical experience in the field, and then I got accepted off the waitlist at Penn. I might still end up taking a year off sometime. Life, as some people need reminding, is not a race. And there's no proof that a college education is the best education I can get at this point in my life. There may be more enjoyable (and cheaper) exploits elsewhere.

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Becker-Posner-Blog

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Becker-Posner-Blog gets a mention in this week's edition of the Economist, in an article about academic blogging. I really like reading Becker-Posner because they rely solely on statistics and proven theory rather than speculation. They stick to what they know and what is concrete in giving their opinions, something that's missed in most commentary. I often end up agreeing with what they have to say. Gary Becker is a Nobel Prize-winning economist and Richard Posner is an influential circuit judge. The opinions and commentary on their site lean to the right, but not by much.

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