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Macroeconomics was born as a distinct field in the 1940s, as a part of the intellectual response to the Great Depression. The term then referred to the body of knowledge and expertise that we hoped would prevent the recurrence of that economic disaster. My thesis in this lecture is that macroeconomics in this original sense has succeeded: Its central problem of depression-prevention has been solved, for all practical purposes, and has in fact been solved for many decades. (Lucas, 2003, Presidential Address to the American Economics Association)
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Double-X shrewdly hired noted sociopath Lucinda Rosenfeld to write its friendship column. This is precisely the kind of fresh, contrarian perspective we've come to expect from the Slate/Double-X brand. Double-X racks up a lot of hits by hiring anti-feminists to diagnose the ills of contemporary feminism. Retaining a psychopath as a friendship guru is the logical next step. On Monday, Rosenfeld answered a later from a woman who woke up in the gutter after someone spiked her drink. She later learned that her friends ditched her after she went to the washroom and didn't come back
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In addition to the weird and now deleted reference to Ronald Reagan as "Ronaldus Magnus", you may have noticed that the site is filled with a lot of what might generously be called non-standard history -- like the idea that the Republican party is made up mainly of people from the 19th century, about half of whom are black. Well we did a little digging and it turns out Steele turned over a lot of the job to a fringe-ish amateur historian named Michael Zak. Meet him here.
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Climate change legislation is moving forward -- but big polluters have shaped much of it. As I noted recently, the Waxman-Markey climate bill, passed by the House last June, gives away 85 percent of pollution permits to the nation's biggest polluters, and the "cap" it proposes on overall carbon emissions would cut greenhouse gas emissions only by an estimated 2 to 4 percent by 2020 compared to the UN reference year of 1990. The Kerry-Boxer bill has a stronger cap on emissions but it's still far short of what's necessary -- and it leaves out the hardest part, which is the actual cap-and-trade mechanism. Why has so little been accomplished? Because coal, shale, oil, big manufacturers, and utilities -- the big old polluters (BOPs) -- have beaten back anything better.
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am not as negative about banking and financial intermediation as William Black, I think intermediaries perform essential functions that, for example, pools risk across individuals, pools deposits over time (i.e. allows long-term loans with short-term deposits), pools small deposits to allow large loans, they help to overcome adverse selection and moral hazard problems by providing monitoring of loans and expertise on the ability of buyers to repay loans that individuals do not have. By providing pooling functions, solving asymmetric information problems, and so on, financial intermediaries allow productive activity to take place that wouldn't occur otherwise, and we are better off because of it.
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To each he and his students give patently made up, economist answers. To the first his student offers the explanation that it must be cheaper to simply put braille on all ATM machines than to spend time/money putting it on some and then trying to make sure that the ones with braille go where they need to be and the ones without go to the drive in ATM sites. Fair enough. Economies of scale and all that, putting braille dots on is probably pretty cheap to begin with. Blah Blah sounds good to me.... At the end of that chapter a moment of reality intervenes. A reader writes in and explains that there's actually something that comes between the ATM machine vendor, the bank, and sheer dollar push/pull and that is, of course--the government, regulation, law and custom. In other words: the ADA requires that all bank ATMs have braille. Never mind! It was still very logical for Frank and his students to try to figure out the basic economic rationality...
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ut what Lizza is telling us is that on the two biggest pieces of macroeconomic management, the Obama administration is pursuing policies that its in-house expert on macroeconomic crisis management believed were far too timid. He’s also telling us that this was done primarily not because people disagreed with her analysis, but because they felt it wasn’t possible, legislatively speaking, to do what was objectively necessary. It’s a bit of a scary situation.
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