Geographer on carrying capacity

Today in the New York Times there is a fun op-ed about the earth's carrying capacity of humans, which references the great Danish economist Esther Boserup (1910-1999) and her revisiting of Malthusian population theory.

Why doctors probably hate economists

I enjoyed reading this NY Times blog review of Emily Oster's new book about questioning the received wisdom from doctors about best practices during pregnancy.  It isn't too surprising that the advice runs conservative, to put it mildly, given how doctors can be sued for malpractice.

Krugman on theory

Here's a nice blog post by Paul Krugman about the death of theory, presumably in cutting edge Ph.D. dissertations and research. He writes how in trade and macro, his sense was that either theory could prove everything or nothing, respectively. My own two cents is that the unprecedented availability of new micro datasets and powerful personal computers to analyze them made empirical economics far more relatively salient.

Mankiw on gold investing

Greg Mankiw gives us a great primer in the NYT about investing in gold that is full of new insights. Probably every economics professor gets asked about this at some point, and here's a great treatment.

History of families and a Crown Heights building

Here's a fun article about the impending sale of a house in Crown Heights that was built in 1888. The author recounts some interesting details about previous occupants that go beyond what one could find in census records, but the exercise could be broadly repeated using publicly available data from censuses in 1940 and earlier.

Inequality measures

A recent NYT blog article discusses recent work by Richard Burkhauser and coauthors on measuring trends in inequality in income net of taxes, transfers, health insurance, capital gains, and kitchen sinks. What a job that must be, I'm glad I haven't waded into that pool! The blog article contains some great quotes from leading economists in the field, and for me the biggest issue is raised by Gary Burtless: to figure out what happens to assets, Burkhauser et al. assume everyone gets the same market returns, and we know that's not true. It's hard to draw any definite conclusions before peer review hopefully exposes any kinks in methodology or lays concerns to rest.

We want to know what's happening to income inequality now, year-to-year, but my two cents is that "completed" or "cohort" inequality, what people have ended up with over their lifetimes after all the dust settles, is the outcome we're more concerned with, and not so much the year-to-year fluctuations unless those appreciably affect long-run outcomes.  Do we know whether they do?  Ah, the challenges of social science when, for very good reasons, it's very difficult to observe every vicissitude for an individual over many periods.

Inflation ups and downs

Like most Americans, the only price I've been keeping track of this summer is of a gallon of gas. But a recent headline led me to an Atlantic article last month with some nifty graphs showing the dip in core PCE inflation. I remember the first worrying dip in fall 2010 because I mentioned it to undergrads. Crazy. I wonder if inflation expectations show a similar set of dips; the article seems to suggest they don't reflect the recent dip.