Some recent items related to economics and business
Perhaps no other discipline has as fraught a relationship with the idea of bias as economics. Because economics is more complex than most of what’s studied in the natural sciences, no set of rules of inquiry will ever fully eliminate the need for judgment calls by the researcher. And judgment calls are where our biases truly have teeth.
In modern economies, people may have jobs, but they still harbor major concerns in a wide range of areas, including security, health and work-life balance, income and distribution, training, mobility, and opportunity. By focusing solely on the unemployment rate, policymakers are ignoring the many dimensions of employment that affect welfare.
Many commentators have interpreted buoyant GDP and unemployment data in the United States as vindicating President Donald Trump's economic policies, and some suggest that his re-election chances have improved as a result. But these indicators fail to measure what really counts for the public.
As a firm believer in the rationality of the public, Barro should consider what the public actually says. According to the most recent Gallup survey, 40% of the public approve of the 2017 tax cuts, while 49% disapprove - a net negative assessment confirmed by several other recent polls. The public is looking beyond any temporary boost in spending and is concerned about growing income and wealth inequality and the soaring budget deficit. Following Barro himself (via Ricardo), they most likely surmise that future tax hikes are on the way.
Critical review of Tyler Cowen's book "Big Business: A love Letter to an American Anti-Hero"
On some of the specific issues he lists, there is probably something
to what he says (and I'm with him in pushing back against the
Elizabeth Warren approach to capitalism and business), but as a
general proposition (which is what he makes it out to be) what he
claims - that companies are a source of social and political good,
going beyond merely the production they facilitate - is at
very least arguable.
...
But businesses are owned, staffed, and run by human beings,
and are unlikely to be consistently any better than those human beings.
If anything, and around the limits and taboos that societies might
seek to establish and maintain, they will often be worse - even as
they remain very narrowly efficient in marshalling inputs and
generating outputs.
What are the odds that Cowen examined the pros and cons of big business without prejudice to come to his conclusions? My guess is he had the title for the book before he ever started writing it. It's well known that cognitive dissonance hampers a persons ability to see facts that go against prior beliefs and the smarter one is the better they are at finding evidence to support their beliefs.
George Mason University has long defended its willingness to take $50,000,000 from the Charles Koch Foundation by insisting that the money didn't come with strings attached -- and insisting that the fact that their economics department says a lot of things that makes Koch very happy is just a mysterious coincidence.
But now the university president, Angel Cabrera, says that he has discovered that since at least 2003, the university's development department (the people who hit up donors for money) have been entering into secret agreements with big-money donors to let them appoint members of the university's hiring committee for the economics department.
Interestingly this is the home of Tyler Cowen, the lover of big business.