Economics Detective Radio

*/ ?>

Latest Episodes:

Classical Economics and the New Poor Law with Gregory Clark Jan 18, 2019

Show notes

Today's guest is economic historian Gregory Clark, and our topic is England's New Poor Law of 1834. Gregory and his co-author, Marianne E. Page, wrote a paper on the topic entitled "Welfare reform, 1834: Did the New Poor Law in England produce significant economic gains?" Spoiler alert: It didn't.

The English Old Poor Law, which before 1834 provided welfare to the elderly, children, the improvident, and the unfortunate, was a bête noire of the new discipline of Political Economy. Smith, Bentham, Malthus, and Ricardo all claimed it created significant social costs and increased rather than reduced poverty. The Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834, drafted by Political Economists, cuts payments sharply. Because local rules on eligibility and provision varied greatly before the 1834 reform, we can estimate the social costs of the extensive welfare provision of the Old Poor Law. Surprisingly there is no evidence of any of the alleged social costs that prompted the harsh treatment of the poor after 1834. Political economy, it seems, was born in sin.

Institutional Cryptoeconomics with Mikayla Novak Jan 13, 2019

Show notes

Today's guest is Mikayla Novak (Twitter, SSRN) of the RMIT Blockchain Innovation Hub at RMIT University. Her work focuses on some innovative new and potential uses for blockchain technology.

As we all know at this point, the first use of blockchain technology was to create decentralized digital currencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum. But a blockchain is a much more general technology than this: it is a decentralized ledger that is resistant to tampering by any one individual. As such, it is a technical innovation that can allow us to coordinate activities that a lack of trust may have prevented otherwise.

Mikayla discusses institutional cryptoeconomics, an emerging field of research centered on the ways blockchain technology can improve both private and public institutions.

Links

Mikayla's Medium article on Crypto Fiscal Federalism discusses how blockchain could make the system of making government grants more transparent and efficient.

This article by Mikayla's colleagues at RMIT gives a detailed and accessible introduction to institutional cryptoeconomics.

The Revolt of the Public with Martin Gurri Jan 05, 2019

Show notes

Today's guest is Martin Gurri (Twitter, blog), author of The Revolt of the Public. We discuss his book, which deals with the impact of information technology on political trends and populism.

In the words of economist and scholar Arnold Kling, "Martin Gurri saw it coming." Technology has categorically reversed the information balance of power between the public and the elites who manage the great hierarchical institutions of the industrial age—government, political parties, the media. The Revolt of the Public tells the story of how insurgencies, enabled by digital devices and a vast information sphere, have mobilized millions of ordinary people around the world. Originally published in 2014, this updated edition of The Revolt of the Public includes an extensive analysis of Donald Trump's improbable rise to the presidency and the electoral triumphs of "Brexit" and concludes with a speculative look forward, pondering whether the current elite class can bring about a reformation of the democratic process, and whether new organizing principles, adapted to a digital world, can arise out of the present political turbulence.

Rent Control and the Housing Debate with Ash Navabi Dec 22, 2018

Show notes

Today on the podcast, Ash Navabi returns to discuss his recent work on housing and rent control. Ash published an opinion piece entitled "Why low-income earners should actually welcome Ontario's reversal on rent control." In that article, Ash pushes back on the kneejerk reaction to the Ontario government's reversal of its rent control policy on new units:

There's no question that there are problems with affordability and livability in certain areas of Ontario, but implementing rigid rent control measures is not the way to fix them. Economists agree: rent control reduces both the quantity and quality of housing available. In a 1988 survey of 443 Canadian economists, fully 95 per cent agreed (in full or with some provisos) with that statement. A more recent survey of 40 economists (including several Nobel laureates) yielded a similar result: only one respondent believed that rent control increased quantity and quality of the housing supply. The reason there is near unanimity on this question is simple: there is ample theory and data in support of the answer. The theory is simple enough. A maximum price policy (which is what rent control is) has two contradictory effects — namely, it increases the quantity demanded for the good, while also decreasing the quantity supplied. In other words, it creates a shortage.

We discuss the policy change that prompted the article, and the backlash the article itself generated, as well as many things related to housing policy.

The Minimum Wage and Labour Market Dynamics with Jonathan Meer Dec 14, 2018

Show notes

Today's guest is Jonathan Meer of Texas A&M. We discuss his work on the minimum wage.

The voluminous literature on minimum wages offers little consensus on the extent to which a wage floor impacts employment. For both theoretical and econometric reasons, we argue that the effect of the minimum wage should be more apparent in new employment growth than in employment levels. In addition, we conduct a simulation showing that the common practice of including state-specific time trends will attenuate the measured effects of the minimum wage on employment if the true effect is in fact on the rate of job growth. Using three separate state panels of administrative employment data, we find that the minimum wage reduces net job growth, primarily through its effect on job creation by expanding establishments. These effects are most pronounced for younger workers and in industries with a higher proportion of low-wage workers.

Seigniorage in the Civil War South with Bryan Cutsinger Dec 07, 2018

Show notes

Today's guest is Bryan Cutsinger of George Mason University, discussing his paper, "Seigniorage in the Civil War South."

During the U.S. Civil War, the Confederate Congress adopted three currency reforms that were intended to reduce the quantity of Treasury notes in circulation by inducing the money-holding public to exchange their notes for long-term bonds. In this paper, we examine the political factors that influenced the adoption of the reforms and their effect on the flow of seigniorage - revenue that the government derived by using the newly-printed Treasury notes to purchase the goods and services it required. We argue that the bifurcation of the Confederate Congress into two groups – those legislators that represented the Confederacy's interior and those from areas no longer under Confederate control – contributed to the adoption of the reforms. Our findings indicate that representing an area outside of the rebel government's control increased the likelihood that a legislator would support efforts to reform the currency by over 90 percent. In addition, our results indicate that the rate of monetary expansion in the South was below that which would have maximized the revenue from seigniorage. We find that the reforms reduced the flow of seigniorage by approximately 57 percent, depriving the Confederate government of much-needed revenue.

Climate Change, Carbon Taxes, and Geo-Engineering with Bob Murphy Nov 09, 2018

Show notes

Today's guest is Bob Murphy of Texas Tech University. We discuss his work on climate change and the social cost of carbon.

Bob started working on issues related to climate change when he started working with the Institute for Energy Research. We discuss the implications of the Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs) used to evaluate the impact of climate change, the pivotal role played by discount rates in evaluating any kind of climate policy, the pitfalls of carbon taxation, and the opportunities presented by geo-engineering technologies.

Here are some links to articles we mentioned in the episode:

William Nordhaus versus the United Nations on Climate Change Economics

The Case Against a U.S. Carbon Tax

The Benefits of Procrastination: The Economics of Geo-engineering

Experimental Economics and the Importance of Instructions Oct 01, 2018

Show notes

Today I discuss one of my own papers: "Instructions" by Freeman, Kimbrough, Petersen, and Tong. This research project on experimental instructions has been ongoing for years, but it was recently conditionally accepted for publication. I tell the story of how the research came together and detail some of the results.

A survey of instruction delivery and reinforcement methods in recent laboratory experiments reveals a wide and inconsistently-reported variety of practices and limited research evaluating their effectiveness. Thus we experimentally compare how methods of delivering and reinforcing experiment instructions impact subjects' understanding and retention. We report a one-shot individual decision task in which mistakes can be unambiguously identified in behavior and find that mistakes are prevalent in our base-line treatment which uses plain, but relatively standard experimental instructions. We find combinations of reinforcement methods that can eliminate half of subjects' mistakes, and we find that we can induce a similar reduction in mistakes via enhancements to the content of instructions. Residual mistakes suggests this may be an important source of noise in experimental studies.

Individual Choice and Social Welfare with Viktor Vanberg Sep 21, 2018

Show notes

Today's guest is Viktor Vanberg of the Walter Eucken Institute. We discuss a recent working paper of his entitled Individual Choice and Social Welfare: Theoretical Foundations of Political Economy.

What we call an economy, i.e. the nexus of economic activities and relations within some defined regional limits – e.g. a local, a national or the world economy –, has always been subject to measures taken, or constraints imposed by political authorities. How economies work is inevitably, and to a significant extent, contingent on the political environment within which they operate. It is not surprising that economists studying the working principles of economic systems have rarely been content with confining their work to describing and explaining the economic realities they observe. Their ambitions always extended to passing judgments on the policies that shaped these realities and to providing guidance for what politics ought to do to improve economic matters. In economics explanations of what is and judgments on what politics should do are often not only more closely intertwined than in most other fields of scientific inquiry, and more than from practitioners in other fields the general public expects economists to pass such policy judgments.

We discuss welfare economics, what it means for economics to be an applied science, and the work of the late James Buchanan.

Why Hayek Matters with Pete Boettke Sep 01, 2018

Show notes

Today's guest is Peter Boettke of George Mason University and we're discussing his recent book in the Great Thinkers in Economics series: F. A. Hayek: Economics, Political Economy and Social Philosophy.

This book explores the life and work of Austrian-British economist, political economist, and social philosopher, Friedrich Hayek. Set within a context of the recent financial crisis, alongside the renewed interest in Hayek and the Hayek-Keynes debate, the book introduces the main themes of Hayek's thought. These include the division of knowledge, the importance of rules, the problems with planning and economic management, and the role of constitutional constraints in enabling the emergence of unplanned order in the market by limiting the perverse incentives and distortions in information often associated with political discretion. Key to understanding Hayek's development as a thinker is his emphasis on the knowledge problem that economic decision makers face and how alternative institutional arrangements either hinder or assist them in overcoming that epistemic dilemma. Hayek saw order emerging from individual action and responsibility under the appropriate institutional order that itself emerges from actors discovering new and better ways to coordinate their behavior. This book will be of interest to all those keen to gain a deeper understanding of this great 20th century thinker in economics.

Note for those interested in buying the book: IF you are at a university and your university library has the Springer subscription (which most do), you can order a print-on-demand version---MyCopy---for $25, so that makes it somewhat more reasonable than the library prices. You can also get a discount flyer here.

Our TOPPODCAST Picks

Follow Us

Stay Connected

Related Podcasts

Links

Stay Connected

Our TOPPODCAST Picks

Follow Us

Stay Connected

Economics Detective Radio

Related Podcasts

1

2

3

4

5

6