Newmark's Door

Brief reviews of three excellent introductory economics books. I'd add Trade-Offs: An Introduction to Economic Reasoning and Social Issues, 2nd ed. to the list.

That's Catherine Rampell writing in the definitely not right-wing Washington Post.

"The times demand serious economic ideas. Harris supplies gimmicks." That's the editorial board of the Washington Post.

"This is not sensible policy, and I think the biggest hope is that it ends up being a lot of rhetoric and no reality. There’s no upside here, and there is some downside.” That's Jason Furman, now at Harvard and former chair of the CEA under President Obama.

Policy analyst at R Street:

It will be interesting to see how this new Harris administration experiment with price controls plays out. It's such a novel idea with absolutely no historical parallel. Oh, wait a minute, that's right . . . we have 40 CENTURIES of experience with it!

Finally, "CFO, investor, and sneakerhead" Robert Sterling gives an imaginative "step-by-step summary" of what would happen after such a policy was implemented.

(A good name for it is "Kamunism".)

At some point the comparison will start to be convincing, will it not?

C'mon, BLS folks, figure it out.

The payroll survey is used to estimate hourly earnings, hours, income and jobs by sampling a bunch of firms and government agencies. The household survey estimates the unemployment rate, among other things by sampling a bunch of households. Both come from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. Both sample in the week leading to the 12th of the month. Together, they tend to create a mosaic of the labour market that analysts and policymakers can read. But for the last couple of years, they’ve each given a very different message about job growth.

Steven Landsburg explains the difference between "microeconomics" and "price theory" and laments the decrease in the teaching of price theory.

"The excerpt above is not the worst example of his industrial policy schemes. As with all industrial policy, the incentives are all wrong: government officials don’t pay for bad decisions and don’t get rewarded for good decisions."

Naw, current enforcement is just following a long antitrust tradition of attacking successful companies: Standard Oil, A&P, IBM, Office Depot, Microsoft, and others.

You can fool some of the economists some of the time, but it's really difficult to fool all the economists all the time, so this says it all: "Few policies raise economists’ ire as much as rent control."

Related: Matthew Iglesias wrote:

The tired, old, neoliberal conventional wisdom is that rent control is a bad idea but if you delve into the most up-to-date research on the subject you'll see that . . . yeah, it's still a bad idea.

"With its move toward protectionism, the party is turning its back on a global system that benefits the US more than any other country."

Positive review of Money and the Rule of Law (edited by Pete Boettke, et al.) by Nathanael Snow, a former student of mine.