Category Teaching
The equivalence between national debt and transferable monopoly rights
I got this idea from reading a Matt Rognlie comment on a previous post. (But Matt may or may not agree with what I say here). A. Suppose the government sells bonds, and finances those bonds by imposing a 10% sales tax on (say) milk. B. Suppose the government sells transferable milk quotas, and sells […]
Maybe profs should haggle over textbook prices?
Mark Perry shows that textbook prices have been increasing, a lot. I don't know why that is. But maybe there's something that profs could do about it. The publisher's rep drops by your office. She asks which book you will be adopting for your course. She really wants the sale. You say:
Individual and aggregate, marginal and total, incentives to cut prices in a recession
The purpose of this post is to lay out the intuition behind my discussion/argument with Steve Randy Waldman. (I'm not sure whether this post will help or hinder my discussion with Steve. But students of New Keynesian macro might find it useful regardless.) We need to distinguish between the individual and aggregate incentives of cutting […]
Are ideas really non-rival?
I was writing a simple teaching post, on ideas and increasing returns to scale, in micro and macro. I wrote down "Ideas are non-rival". Then I thought I had better explain what I meant by that. Then I thought about professors, who do research (thinking up new ideas), and teaching (communicating existing ideas to other […]
Another tiny money/macro model for microeconomists
With monetary exchange, and both recessions and booms. This one is based on Nick Edmond's model. You can think of it as a cross between my previous model and what Paul Krugman calls "The World's Smallest Macro Model" (pdf). This model really does work in a 3D Edgeworth Box. (I messed it up a bit […]
I need a 3D symmetric Edgeworth box to explain money/macro
The new world's simplest money/macro model? OK microeconomists, here's some money/macro for you. I want a very simple model. The model will be extremely unrealistic. It won't look anything like the real world. But it will help me explain one very important fact about the real world. It will be a model of a pure […]
When I really learned the David Ricardo idea
[Update: Tim Worstall has a beautiful response to this post, applying the Ricardian idea to trade between humans and robots (or the human owners of robots). Will the robots out-compete us in everything, causing mass unemployment? Nope. Robots will never have a comparative advantage in everything. Once again, Tim's Ricardian point seems totally obvious once […]
Lump of Labour, Say’s Law, and the slope of the AD curve
I wrote this partly for Sandwichman, and mostly I wrote it because this same question crops up time and time again. It's a very old question, but it always looks like a new question if the technology is new enough. People in caves were probably arguing about whether 3-D printing robots flints would cause mass […]
Does capital income exist?
[Ages ago, as a graduate student, I "wasted" my time (when I should have been finishing my thesis) reading capital theory, including the more "heterodox" stuff. My memory is pretty hazy, but I still think about the old questions occasionally. There's nothing really new here for economists familiar with "dated goods".] 1. Suppose I know […]
Ours the task eternal — investing in human capital
That's the motto of Carleton University, where I work. Carleton's task, and my task, and the students' task, is to produce educated students. It takes a lot of resources to do this: my time, the students' time, the support staff's time, plus the use of buildings and land, and hydro. All those resources could be […]
Worthwhile Canadian Initiative 
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