Ezra Klein

I can’t seem to access about half the posts, but this debate between Tyler Cown and Brad DeLong on the wisdom of the stimulus package sure has the potential to be interesting…

One problem with the conversation over cutting the budget is that the 20 percent of federal dollars that go towards the defense sector are considered sacrosanct. This is not a very wise move. Defense spending is second only to entitlement spending in total cost. And while it’s hard to make the case that seniors need […]

The research suggesting that men who conceive late in life are likelier to produce children who suffer from schizophrenia, autism, etc, does not seem likely, as Dana hopes, to create symmetry in the way men and women feel about child-bearing. For women, there’s a biological issue that they can’t have children after a certain age. […]

I think Matt misunderstands my point on beat sweeteners. The disagreement is not over whether news articles meant to secure future access to sources would be a bad thing if they existed. They’d be wildly unethical. The question is whether they exist. Do reporters actually say, either to themselves or their editors, that I am […]

Uwe Reinhardt explains: Evidently, many Americans do sincerely believe that when a public health plan refuses to pay for a procedure it is “rationing,” while denial of health care to an uninsured, low-income individual who cannot afford to pay for that care is not. But as textbooks in economics explicitly teach, the role of prices […]

The New York Times has a sensible editorial on the public insurance option today. Their conclusion, in particular, strikes the right tone. “A new public plan is neither the cornerstone of health care reform nor the death knell of private insurance,” they write. “It should be tried as one element of comprehensive reform. If, over […]

This sort of thing is a bit outside my zone of competence to evaluate, but this paper by Harvard’s Joshua Coval and Erik Stafford and Princeton’s Jakub Jurek makes a seemingly compelling case that the toxic assets are not currently overvalued. Instead, they’re finally being correctly valued. And if that’s the case, argue the authors, […]

Tyler Cowen gives I Love You, Man, a good capsule review. I sort of disagree. Rather, it’s a bad movie that seems sort of like a good movie. Further commentary after the fold to avoid spoilers.

Some scary charts over at VoxEU.org suggest it already is. There, economists Barry Eichengreen and Kevin O’Rourke remind that the Great Depression “was a global phenomenon” and our “Great Recession” has to be evaluated, at least occasionally, in similarly international terms. And the global picture, they say, has taken “an even uglier turn.” Global stock […]

Commenter Nylund notices that economists are a particularly long-lived species: Is it just me or do famous economists seem to live a really long time?Friedman (94).Mises (92)John Kenneth Galbraith (98)Hayek (92)Leontief (93)Except poor Keynes. I think the main reason Keynesian economics took a backburner was because so many his opponents simply outlived him.But, besides Keynes […]