People inside the federal government sometimes describe Washington as a battleground between economists and lawyers. Case in point: when I was reporting recently on the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, some Washington hands spoke of the agency not in theoretical terms—as an institution that represents a reaction against deregulatory thinking in finance, say—but in terms of turf: as a place where there were too many lawyers and not enough people with econ Ph.D.s walking around. The financial crisis has probably helped the lawyers' side in the Washington turf war. As Betsey ... Read More
Economics: the Academic Discipline that Wins by Eating Everything
August 8, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
Why 320 Million Indians Didn’t Notice When the Lights Went Out
August 6, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
Last week, the giant blackout in India – reportedly the largest in human history – furnished many of us here in America with a valuable opportunity to raise issues about our own increasingly blackout-prone electric grid. We’ve had plenty to say on this topic here. But the actual experience of the blackout in India was not exactly what the newsleads probably led many of us to imagine. “On Tuesday, India suffered the largest electrical blackout in history, affecting an area encompassing about 670 million people,” the New York Times reported. As Jonathan ... Read More
