A defense of why neuroeconomics is not neurotrash

Very poorly return; its a bit too deterministic at times but the writer does seem to try to reach a rational conclusion.

Encouraging children to (respectfully) ask their teachers and parents why – and the parents and teachers giving a respectful answer – is not going to lead to the downfall of society. If anything, it is going to lead to adults who may think more reflectively about their choices.

I can only report that The End of Poverty, narrated throughout by Martin Sheen, puts Ayn Rand back on the map as an accurate and indeed insightful cultural commentator. If you were to take the most overdone and most caricatured cocktail-party scenes from Atlas Shrugged, if you were to put the content of Rand’s “whiners” on the screen, mixed in with at least halfway competent production values, you would get something resembling The End of Poverty. If you ever thought that Rand’s nemeses were pure caricature, this film will show you that they are not (if the stalking presence of Naomi Klein has not already done so). If you are looking to benchmark this judgment, consider this: I would not say anything similar even about the movies of Michael Moore.

I am not aware of a single political leader in the U.S., either Democrat or Republican, who would cut health-care spending in order to free up money for biotechnology research — or, more generally, who would make serious cuts to the welfare state in order to free up serious money for major engineering projects. Robert Moses, the great builder of New York City in the 1950s and 1960s, or Oscar Niemeyer, the great architect of Brasilia, belong to a past when people still had concrete ideas about the future. Voters today prefer Victorian houses. Science fiction has collapsed as a literary genre. Men reached the moon in July 1969, and Woodstock began three weeks later. With the benefit of hindsight, we can see that this was when the hippies took over the country, and when the true cultural war over Progress was lost.

Mr Carney's archives ought to be more than enough to disabuse anyone of the belief that "regulations being turned into weapons of business power" is not a "major, reccuring problem".

How is it possible that so many politicians, their huge bureaucracies, important groups in the scientific establishment, important segment of business people and almost all journalists see it differently? The only reasonable explanation is that — without having paid sufficient attention to the arguments — they have already invested too much into global warming alarmism. Some of them are afraid that by losing this doctrine their political and professional pride would suffer. Others are earning a lot of money on it and are afraid of losing that source of income. Business people hope they will make a fortune out of it and are not ready to write it off. They all have a very tangible vested interest in it. We should say loudly: This coalition of powerful special interests is endangering us.

Take this joseph stiglitz. You always talk about income inequality using outdated price indices.

Today "pro-business" often gets equated with assuaging the desires of the business lobby. But Atlas excoriates those "businessmen" who spend their time liquoring up politicians to coax favors or crush competitors. What it celebrates is the activity of business--the process of production and trade that has taken us from mud huts to Manhattan. The true producer Rand shows, makes just one demand of Washington: "Get the hell out of my way!"

Previously known as the "Miscellaneous Tariff Bill," Democrats rechristened it the "U.S. Manufacturing Enhancement Act of 2010."

Bastiat has a wonderful way of explaining why protectionism and tariffs are awful for growth. It implicitly means that the government or people think that their measure of wealth is directly tied to how scarce/expensive a product or service is - the more expensive it is or the harder to make - the greater the wealth. Which is absurd and the very opposite of what is desirable.

But things got worse for the professor. Matching Krugman's repeated claim that the "stimulus" was too small, Sean produced peer-reviewed economic science from Alesina, who examined 92 attempts at stimulus since 1970 in OECD countries and found that tax cuts, but not spending, stimulated. Krugman stammered a reply, but the damage was done; his acolytes had learned that economic science existed that contradicted Krugman's claim (central to Obama's "stimulus" legislation) that government's spending your money helps an economy.

Matching Krugman's claim that government can "create wealth by printing money," several posters cited the latest economic science showing that the "multipliers" that Keynesians use are wrong. They further noted that Krugman had used these wrong multipliers seventeen months ago to predict incorrectly that Obama's stimulus package would keep unemployment below 9%.

And I'm told that its impossible to get balanced coverage on Fox. Really ? Sounds like a balanced reporter has given us the whole story on what happened on both sides. So did David Frum on the Week.

something to analyze in terms of the trader principle. Even in the Aristotelian 'true friendship' , the nature of the exchange is not monetary or economic, it is about exchange of slightly more intangible spiritual values. That

And she’ll be spending that money: as a new book on female economic power, Influence, points out, American women are responsible for 83 percent of all consumer purchases; they hold 89 percent of U.S. bank accounts, 51 percent of all personal wealth, and are worth more than $5 trillion in consumer spending power—larger than the entire Japanese economy. On a global level, women are the biggest emerging market in the history of the planet—more than twice the size of India and China combined. It’s a seismic change, and by all indications it will continue: of the 15 job categories expected to grow the most in the next decade, all but two are filled primarily by women.

President Obama's tragic mistake was to blow out the U.S. federal balance sheet on spending that has produced little bang for the buck. The fantastical Keynesian notion (the "multiplier") that $1 of spending produces $1.50 in growth was long ago demolished by Harvard's Robert Barro, among others. That $1 in spending has to come from somewhere, which means in taxes or borrowing from productive parts of the private economy. Given that so much of the U.S. stimulus went for transfer payments such as Medicaid and unemployment insurance, the "multiplier" has almost certainly been negative.

More evidence that journals and publishing companies are on their way out if they don't adapt to a more open source style.

The problem is not the shorts, but the longs

The man if f-ing awesome.

"He treats waste in government as a moral offense. “Government isn’t a business, and it shouldn’t be run as a business,” he said. “But it can be more like business. It has a lot to learn from businessmen.” Government operates without the market pressures that produce efficiency and increase quality. The challenge for government leaders is to produce those pressures to economize internally, through an act of will. “Never take a dollar from a free citizen through the coercion of taxation without a very legitimate purpose,” he said in an interview last year. “We have a solemn duty to spend that dollar as carefully as possible, because when we took it we diminished that person’s freedom.” When you put it like that, overspending by government seems un-American. "

"Many of the advances in healthcare and life expectancy are due to the pharmaceutical industry so we should never demonize them," said U of T's Golden. "We need to ensure that they maintain a profitable business but our ability to make it very very profitable is constrained right now."
Scotia Capital's Webb said one cost-saving idea may be to make patients aware of how much it costs each time they visit a healthcare professional. "(The public) will use the services more wisely if they know how much it's costing," she said.
"If it's absolutely free with no information on the cost and the information of an alternative that would be have been more practical, then how can we expect the public to wisely use the service?

"Economics"

In the Huffington Post one-time investment banker Ann Lee, now an economics professor at NYU, has called for "a new economic ideology" that focuses on "human dignity, creative and degrees of freedom" instead of following traditional measurements of material well-being. This "new" economy, she argues, would provide greater returns to favored groups like artists and, of course, teachers, who she considers severely underpaid .

Yippee, Paul Hsieh gets heard.

I like the pro-human attitude of this green. Its a refreshing change.

"Design is the complete opposite of sustainability. We would still live on trees if we were sustainable. Sustainability just keeps the same things over and over again. Instead we should celebrate being human beings and our creativity, which is far more important than sustainability. "

"So believe me, we are not too many people on this planet. If you take the total weight of the planet’s ants on one hand and the total weight of human beings on the other, you’ll see that the ants’ weight is four times higher. It is not only the number, but ants weigh out human beings. Further they have a much shorter life span than we have. And because they work much harder physically than we do, the calorie consumption of ants equals about 30 billion people. It is clearly not about the fact that we are too many. Ants don’t produce waste. They don’t need to minimize waste. They produce nutrients. Again it is a design question."

Precisely because human life is prolifically diverse, the history of Utopian politics is littered with offences against freedom by people who thought they knew what the people really wanted. The economics of happiness invariably leads to the politics of paternalism. The happiness gurus would be better off starting with Aristotle’s generous account of flourishing, an idea that implies people choosing their own life course. If politicians need a single objective — and it is not obvious that they do — then setting the people free is a lot better than forcing them to be happy.

Here’s how he put it on Meet the Press: “What I say is if climate change is a hoax, it’s the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the United States of America. Because everything we would do to get ready for climate change, to build this new green industry, would make us more respected, more entrepreneurial, more competitive, more healthy as a country.”

Thus Plato’s noble lie is resuscitated in a pas de deux of flimflammery. The diagnosis might be fake, but the cure will still fix your lumbago, whiten your teeth, and give your horse a shiny coat.

Such action would also have shown up as specious the argument that "if we do not pay, the talent will go away." If tax measures were implemented globally, where would the talent go? Some of it, perhaps, to hedge funds. That would be an appropriate, even elegant, solution, because the kinds of risks some of the bankers were taking are best suited for hedge funds. As for the rest of the bankers… they should just stay put and expect to get paid when they start adding value, not merely leeching from public policy.

I think its interesting work. This is what the Nobel Prize Committee
said about her.
"Elinor Ostrom has challenged the conventional wisdom that common
property is poorly managed and should be either regulated by central
authorities or privatized. Based on numerous studies of user-managed
fish stocks, pastures, woods, lakes, and groundwater basins, Ostrom
concludes that the outcomes are, more often than not, better than
predicted by standard theories. She observes that resource users
frequently develop sophisticated mechanisms for decision-making and
rule enforcement to handle conflicts of interest, and she
characterizes the rules that promote success-ful outcomes."

A good friend of mine already blogged about this last year http://fifth-city.com/blog/news/2009/03/the-gods-of-the-copybook-headings. Bret Stephens is thinking in principles (according to HB).

"In today's economy, the hard truth is that we can't spend,
consume, manipulate and inflate our way to general prosperity--as
opposed merely to the enrichment of Democratic Party interest
groups. This was the dominant economic model of the 1970s, with
results that were once well known." (but this doesn't stop history from repeating itself and hence the gods of the copybook headings)

Such is the extent of Obama's magical realism that he can promise to post all bills on the Internet five days before signing them, serially break that promise and then, when announcing that he wouldn't even try anymore, have a spokesman present the move as yet another example of "providing the American people more transparency in government."

Gambling/Investing means taking a risk, people shouldn't forget that... they should suffer the consequences of their actions

Spending $1 trillion to fix the banks and investment firms isn’t the answer to our financial problems. Just let the market decide who and what survives.

“A dwelling-house, as such, contributes nothing to the revenue of its inhabitant,” Smith said in The Wealth of Nations. “If it is lett [sic] to a tenant for rent, as the house itself can produce nothing, the tenant must always pay the rent out of some other revenue.” Therefore Smith concluded that, although a house can make money for its owner if it is rented, “the revenue of the whole body of the people can never be in the smallest degree increased by it”. [281]*

It is not free market capitalism that failed. But the failure to save free market capitalism from the crony capitalists and regulators

But it is probable that instead of better regulation, we will simply get more of it. Regulatory institutions are hard to replace; over time they develop strong constituencies in both their employees and the institutions they regulate -- institutions that would rather deal with the devil they know, especially since the devil they know often functions as a barrier to entry for newer, smaller firms that might grow into real competition. Real reform -- in the original sense of remaking the institutions into a better form -- seems unlikely. Rather more certain is that down the road, some other financial crisis will take the beefed up bodies by surprise.

I am so old that I can remember a Democrat, at his inauguration as president, say of our enemies: “We dare not tempt them with weakness.”

yuck