UPDATE: Commenters Leonard and David Friedman point out that the first bullet point was not quite accurate, so I changed it.
- What do ALL economists agree on? Free trade is good. Gold standards are substantially bad for some important things.. If you have studied the topic more than the economists, then I'd like to hear the debate. Otherwise...10:1 says you're wrong.
- Klein clone, honestly appraising jobless numbers.
- Seth Roberts on personal medicine methodology.
- Borepatch disagrees with me. Calls up social differences. Very insightful. As he says...much more stewing before I can answer.
- Henderson makes one of my consistency/universalism points, but more clearly. I advocate principles, not people. Jehu argues that we should give up on principles, and admit we're arguing for our team. I'm not...and people who are tend to disgust me.
- QoTD from Arnold Kling. 3 lines.
- Goodman making my point about HSAs...it's better for everyone except the insurance companies...ALL the time. Non-HSA approaches are unjustifiable to consumers.
- I argued recently that DeLong was being stupid about laffer curves and max-take vs. max-growth curves, and said that Dan Mitchell had done the math. Now, Mitchell tosses out the numbers again, clearly. At least look at the graphs.
- Lansburg has a great Graph discussing economic-growth...look.
- Caplan on Cowen on good-vs-evil. Moderately unusually (outside philosophy) I disagree with Caplan. Most positions have two (or twelve) smart sides to them...and *good* reasons for each of the sides. There is almost never a clear distinction between the right positions/good side and the wrong positions.
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9 comments:
You claim that economists all agree that "Free trade is good. Gold standards are bad."
The first is close to true. The second is not. A gold standard has both advantages and disadvantages compared to a system of fiat money. You might consider, among other things, that fiat money has led to multiple hyperinflations, (Weimar Germany, Hungary, more recently Zimbabwe), gold standards to none.
While there are probably economists who would agree with you, there are quite a lot who would not.
And yes, I'm an economist.
Having now followed the link, I observe that the actual claim is that all of a small and non-random collection of economists
"disagreed with the claim that returning to a gold standard would improve price-stability or employment outcomes."
That is a considerably weaker statement than "gold standards are bad."
Aretea,
What would you think about universal HSAs?
I.E. People pay taxes, the government is the only insurer, they pay anything over $X,XXX a year (where $X,XXX would be fairly high).
I would probably outlaw insurance beyond that, but not private payments for healthcare.
Regarding the gold standard, you and I have already fenced about the quality of that NBER dataset before.
Regarding the gold standard, as Dr. Friedman notes, the gold standard question is worded rather badly. To my mind the most straightforward interpretation of the question is as asking about returning to a fractional gold standard under the Fed -- i.e., what it did from inception to 1933, and/or from 1933 until 1971. (Both standards failed, for fairly obvious reasons at least in retrospect.) By contrast, few goldbugs advocate anything softer than a 100% gold standard. (I laid this out in more detail to the hippies at Jim Henley's blog a while back... ah yes, linkie.)
How are they right about e.g. the gold standard?
Returning immediately to the gold standard would be a terrible idea. Chaos = delta(power). Or, Greece lost the power to inflate when it adopted the Euro.
David,
IIRC, you're the first economist I ever read seriously on the topic of the gold standard (20+ years ago), and you were arguing against it in favor of a basket-of-goods approach.
I always vet things like this against my distinctly non-professorial knowledge of economics, and this matched up moderately well.
Thank you for checking the details, and clarifying.
Anon,
As per the last 4 times We've chatted on the topic...I have four primary goals here.
1. Encourage economic growth.
2. Allow better solutions to emerge.
3. Think clearly, understanding the proper existence of disagreement.
4. Freedom is a (not the only) highly valuable good.
5. Decentralization is a good thing, allowing folks to exit.
If someone is putting guns to our heads and forcing a universal choice...Universal HSAs + Catastrophic coverage are far and away the best we've found...for the purposes of 1.
HOWEVER, that doesn't address 2,3,4. What about the better solution that's sitting out there. What happens if Watson completes its transformation into medical diagnostician, Kaiser buys it, and suddenly can deliver better health care than you can find on your own? I don't want to preclude the Kaiser model....or any other model.
What I want is for the government to *as much as possible* GTFO so as to allow the solutions to get better for the consumer over time. (What we have now is not GTFO, it's massive privileging of the first-dollar insurance model).
I would also prefer a system where folks like you, born unlucky, have their bad luck mitigated...and where folks who don't want to help support *you* have convenient right to exit.
I'm only a 4+-sigma-guy, though, and that's not smart enough to solve these problems without trying a bunch of stuff.
I don't see how universal HSAs + cata coverage by the government precludes using Watson as a medical diagnostician.
"I would also prefer a system where folks like you, born unlucky, have their bad luck mitigated...and where folks who don't want to help support *you* have convenient right to exit."
These two demands seem completely contradictory.
Anon...
1. I was trying to demo a case wherein the HMO first-dollar comprehensive model beat the HSA model...one which actually required expertise in medical decisionmaking for cost savings seemed the most likely.
2. I agree. It seems that way. But evolutionary systems are my thing. And the Berlin wall sucks.
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