Most Americans don't know this.
What is the government's primary function? If you look at the debates that rage each year when the president's budget comes out, you'd think it was defense spending. Or food stamps. Or cancer research. Or student loans.
"Improving the quality of life in cities matters to more than just the people who live in them."
Easy: macro is hard.
A recent working paper by Zidong An, Joao Tovar Jalles, and Prakash Loungani discovered that of 153 recessions in 63 countries from 1992 to 2014, only five were predicted by a consensus of private-sector economists in April of the preceding year. And the economists tended to underestimate the magnitude of the slump until the year was almost over.
Remember: "There’s only one reliable rule of thumb in macro".
Manhattan Institute paper that argues Medicare Advantage is already quite good but that it could be even better.
I hold no brief for Atlas Shrugged--rather than a novel, it would have been far better as a philosophical tract at about one-sixth the length--but this take on one of its central messages is useful and quite correct:
Atlas Shrugged shows us an all-too-familiar pattern: Washington do-gooders blaming the problems they’ve created on the free market, and using them as a pretext for expanding their power. And more: it provides the fundamental explanation for why the government gets away with continually increasing its control over the economy and our lives.
By Richard Epstein. I'd make it a bit simpler and just say beware of any antitrust law, period.
Economist Scott Sumner brutally takes "Modern Monetary Theory" apart. It gets a bit bloody, so this is not for the squeamish.
"To borrow from P. J. O’Rourke, the good news is that the rich will pay for everything. The bad news is that you’re rich."
It doesn't seem smart to argue with billg about most things.
One of the central messages--if not the most central--I take from econoimcs is that people respond to incentives. A corollary is that if you operate any system--not matter how well-intentioned and compassionate and well-designed--some people will try to game it.
We ignore this at substantial cost.