EconTech

You often hear some cynical economist raining on the parade of some naive do-gooders who want to help the poor. Sure, there are economists who could care less about the poor, but plenty care a great deal. The problem for them is that the ‘obvious’ solutions to poverty relief are, with some economic analysis, easily [...]

The Alesina et.al post has been sitting in my browser for quite some time. It just keeps getting pushed back over other stuff. I wanted to post on it in connection with affirmative action. But this seems just as good of a time to post it.
If something like this is to be done, the wage [...]

Dani summarizes for us:
Trade and the great divergence

Opening up to international trade raises the return to skills in advanced economies and reduces it in the less advanced ones, according to the standard factor-endowments story. If human capital accumulation in turn depends on these returns to skills, trade should enhance human capital accumulation in the rich [...]

At least, that is one take on the paper. For people who like to keep up with the minutia (but important minutia!) of development economics, here is one on ITNs for malaria control:
Jeff Sachs vindicated

On insecticide-treated bed nets (ITNs), at least.  There has been an ongoing battle between Sachs and segments of the global public [...]

I haven’t read the paper, but it confirms about what I suspect: that there may be some negative marginal effects associated with AA policies, but that the overall impact is likely to be positive at the individual level. There are other reasons to believe that it will increase institutional efficiency, but that is for another [...]

I wish. But I suspect, for many jobs at least, this may not work. Consider the attorney example. Maybe tall, white, pretty, aged men impose a (socially constructed) commanding presence in a court room and at client dinners and such more than others. Thus, they earn more on average BECAUSE of their added profit value [...]

When I first started reading and writing on inequality, one of the first conceptual issues that came up which I was unable to satisfactorily resolve was how to assign technological developments to which part of my estimates. I assumed people smarter than me had a good way of figuring this out, but never came across [...]

More on this when I get to finishing my posts on affirmative action and race. But the rhetorical question here: “if careful economic analysis had instead favored taxing men less than women, how many supporters do you think that proposal would have found, even among economists” is, in my mind, useless. Careful economic analysis that [...]

As I’ve said, I don’t really like getting involved in partisan politics. But this is interesting. A note for further reading.

Bush boom bah
You know you’re a serious wonk when you wait eagerly each year for the arrival of the CBO’s “Historical Effective Federal Tax Rates.” But it’s much more than a tax report — it’s [...]

So, this whole thing started out when Sen. Clinton said that a pause on Doha may be needed to re-examine our political considerations given to trade. Despite the fact that the last few regional trade deals have been terribly constructed (can you say CAFTA?), my favorite paper jumped on the relevant part of the interview [...]

That’s right. If you are like me, and ignore 90% of YouTube clips that get across my screen due to the surprisingly (or not so surprisingly) small hit rate for clips worth watching, you can now sit down to some rather nice videos (and often, mp3’s, you can even avoid flash by downloading the mp4s) [...]

In a policy debate, data is usually good. But it is important to put data in context. Before I rant:
“Does Death Penalty Save Lives? A New Debate”:
This is easy for me. It doesn’t matter whether the research on the issue is valid or not. I’m against the death penalty. Period.:
Does Death Penalty Save [...]

You often here in introductory economics courses that discussions of inequality is a separate issue as discussing poverty. I’ve always had a problem with these notes (and so have lots of other people). Besides the obvious mathematical connection (can you name how many measurements of inequality are not based on some measure of poverty or [...]

Comment:
Yes, more on this. To a large extent, I agree with the sentiments here. This is part of what I find so appealing about Rawlsian Justice and Rawlsian social welfare functions. The naive libertarian notion (that is, there are libertarians with more sophisticated views than this, but they are small enough in number to ascribe [...]

Four years ago the Bush administration, exploiting the political bounce it got from the illusion of success in Iraq, pushed a cut in capital-gains and dividend taxes through Congress. It was an extremely elitist tax cut even by Bush-era standards: the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center says that more than half of the tax breaks went [...]