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Request for requests
What would you like to hear about? What questions do you have? No promises are made, but your chances can only go up.
Posted by Tyler Cowen on August 20, 2008 at 09:30 AM in Web/Tech | Permalink
Comments
top economic misconceptions of the lay people you wish you could correct?
Posted by: Delirious at Aug 20, 2008 9:48:59 AM
In your post from a few years ago, "If I believed in Austrian business cycle theory," you made some of the most apt predictions you have made on this blog. Nearly everything has come true. Obviously though you are not touting these predictions because being associated with the "intransigent" Austrians will damage your credibility as a hip, quirky thinker. So instead, can you just give me a socio-economic cost-benefit analysis of breast implants.
Posted by: Karl at Aug 20, 2008 9:52:29 AM
Is the overall demand for concert tickets elastic or inelastic? If elastic, then what's with the ridiculous Ticketmaster service charges? Why doesn't anybody care about Ticketmaster acting as the only source [well, about 90% of the market] for purchasing tickets? These were just a few of my thoughts as I attended several recent summer concerts with only 1/2 the seats filled. I haven't found any great research on this matter.
Posted by: Meds at Aug 20, 2008 9:55:40 AM
The five best reasons to think you should be more dogmatic about the economic beliefs you are are not dogmatic about.
Posted by: J. at Aug 20, 2008 9:56:15 AM
You've spent a lot of time studying economic models. You probably have an opinion about their overall reliability.
How should that opinion influence your view of the issue of environmental change, given that many of the inferences about such change come from general climate models that are, in some ways, very similar to economic models?
Posted by: Rich at Aug 20, 2008 9:59:27 AM
I'd be interested in your thoughts on eliminating the separate
Social Security tax and adjusting income taxes to compensate.
Posted by: mikesdak at Aug 20, 2008 10:01:09 AM
I'd be interested in your thoughts on eliminating the separate
Social Security tax and adjusting income taxes to compensate.
Posted by: mikesdak at Aug 20, 2008 10:02:07 AM
Thoughts on the legitimacy and progress of complex adaptive systems research and modeling in economics.
Posted by: Dave at Aug 20, 2008 10:02:33 AM
I'd like to hear your views about the rise of randomized trial experiments and the obsession with "clever" instruments versus structural or quasi structural empirical work. Keane (JoE, forthcoming) and Rust (JoE, forthcoming) have a really good discussion of how there are many, many assumptions that go into atheoretic, clever instruments-based empirical work, but they just go unstated. Any thoughts?
Posted by: Al at Aug 20, 2008 10:03:40 AM
There's been recent talk about what would happen if the legal drinking
age were lowered to 18. Would there be a net increase or decrease in risky
binge drinking, accidents, etc?
Posted by: dan at Aug 20, 2008 10:04:03 AM
I'd love to get your thoughts on the 'eat local' and 'locavore' nonsense.
Posted by: Speedmaster at Aug 20, 2008 10:04:27 AM
Morality and economics. Or, what role would economics play in public policy in a libertarian world?
Posted by: Phil Maymin at Aug 20, 2008 10:04:49 AM
Why Steve Sailer is wrong.
Posted by: Blackadder at Aug 20, 2008 10:06:49 AM
The economics of magazine/periodical distribution. Why does it take 6-8 weeks to get the first issue when you subscribe? Why on earth is there a 'bill me later' option? (What else can you buy in a 'bill me later' fashion?)
Posted by: one.person at Aug 20, 2008 10:07:24 AM
Hi Prof Tyler Cowen,
Are some prediction markets inherently incapable of predicting the future?
midasoracle.org/2008/08/20/vp-candidate-prediction-markets/
Posted by: Chris Masse at Aug 20, 2008 10:07:26 AM
What's the best way to interpret happiness research? Does it tell us useful things about how to structure public policy? About living one's own life?
Posted by: Richard S. at Aug 20, 2008 10:09:51 AM
"The five best reasons to think you should be more dogmatic about the economic beliefs you are are not dogmatic about."
Hehe, that's kind of like the one "tell me where you think you are wrong."
Personally, I think one should only be dogmatic about only one or two things in life. I choose politics and economics.
I just got done watching "The Corporation." I'd accidentally gotten the second disk previously, which I found a lot more interesting than the main documentary. They actually talk about externalities, etc. The business people talk about internalizing them while the lefties demand expanding the commons. Personally, I think it's dumb that the government requires corporations to ONLY maximize shareholder value. It's probably not that bad (heaven knows that in my last job I was incessantly harassed about diversity, the environment, yada yada yada, to the detriment of my customers), and surely not viewed as a government problem by the lefties, but "The Corporation" comes close to the problem even if their solutions are misguided.
Anyway, what are the "best" arguments against free market liberal capitalism and what are the answers to them?
Oh, and how 'bout a flying penguin?
Posted by: Andrew at Aug 20, 2008 10:10:51 AM
Tyler,
With increasing government regulation of our airline travel, the default now is that you can fly on U.S. airlines unless you're on the no-fly list. What do you think are the odds that within 10 years, the default option will be that you are allowed to fly only if you're on the "let-fly" list?
Best,
David
Posted by: David R. Henderson at Aug 20, 2008 10:10:51 AM
How about explaining Ricardian Equivalence in light of tax proposals which imply very large deficits?
Is a "tax cut" really a tax cut if the gov't just borrows the money to pay for it? In theory, citizens are supposed to be smart enough to know that the bills will have to be paid -- by them. In theory, they know it's not a tax cut, but just a tax shift.
So perhaps all tax proposals should be "normalized" to reflect the net present value of tax obligations. E.g. if a candidate cuts taxes for group X but not group Y, and leaves everything else the same, then that is really a tax INCREASE on group Y exactly equal to the net tax cut on group X.
Apparently people don't behave in practice as they "should" in theory. Does this means economists and journalists are not doing their jobs in explaining what actually happened in past administrations or the current candidates' tax proposals?
Posted by: a student of economics at Aug 20, 2008 10:11:48 AM
The effects of the Federal Deficit on the next presidency.
Posted by: Doug Cochran at Aug 20, 2008 10:11:56 AM
I've been watching the olympics a bit lately, and I was wondering:
Are there huge bias problems in sports that are scored by subjective judging (gymnastics, diving, etc)? Everything is scored in numbers, and there are even different difficulty ratings assigned to different moves and routines, but it all seems highly subjective.
I mean, if we have referee bias in basketball, where the game essentially hinges on the easily quantifiable number of times a ball goes into the net...
Posted by: d.cous. at Aug 20, 2008 10:14:55 AM
Latin America's Under-Performance
http://www.debatableland.com/the_debatable_land/2008/08/latin-americas-under-performance.html
Tyler Cowen is generously soliciting questions: here's mine, asked knowing that Tyler is keen on South America and capable of answering almost anything...
Why do Latin American countries perform so poorly at the Olympic Games? The Republics of the Caucasus and Central Asia win medals in sports such as wrestling and weight-lifting, West Africa has produced sprinters while East Africans dominate distance running. Is Latin America's comparative failure explained by a combination of poverty and physiological factors? That is to say, do Latin American countries with high Indian populations suffer from an in-built disadvantage? If so, does this help explain why Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay, three countries with greater European and, in the case of Brazil, African immigration are also the dominant (historically and currently) soccer powers on the continent?
But then you might also think Argentina and Brazil would do better in the Olympics than they do, wouldn't you? Argentina waited decades before winning golds in basketball and soccer in Athens. This is a poor return, surely, for a country with such a european-gened population. True, polo is no longer an Olympic sport and this disadvantages them, but why are there so few Argentine eventers or show jumpers?
Alternative theory: soccer is so popular that it crowds out the marketplace for other sports across the continent. (And, in Argentina, rugby which is an elite sport that draws wealthy athletes away from Olympic sports?) But really, I don't know. How would you explain it?
Relatedly, is it just the absence of rugby and cricket from the Olympics that explains South Africa's woeful performance?
Tyler Cowen is generously soliciting questions: here's mine, asked knowing that Tyler is keen on South America and capable of answering almost anything...
Why do Latin American countries perform so poorly at the Olympic Games? The Republics of the Caucasus and Central Asia win medals in sports such as wrestling and weight-lifting, West Africa has produced sprinters while East Africans dominate distance running. Is Latin America's comparative failure explained by a combination of poverty and physiological factors? That is to say, do Latin American countries with high Indian populations suffer from an in-built disadvantage? If so, does this help explain why Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay, three countries with greater European and, in the case of Brazil, African immigration are also the dominant (historically and currently) soccer powers on the continent?
But then you might also think Argentina and Brazil would do better in the Olympics than they do, wouldn't you? Argentina waited decades before winning golds in basketball and soccer in Athens. This is a poor return, surely, for a country with such a european-gened population. True, polo is no longer an Olympic sport and this disadvantages them, but why are there so few Argentine eventers or show jumpers?
Alternative theory: soccer is so popular that it crowds out the marketplace for other sports across the continent. (And, in Argentina, rugby which is an elite sport that draws wealthy athletes away from Olympic sports?) But really, I don't know. How would you explain it?
Relatedly, is it just the absence of rugby and crcet from the Olympics that explains South Africa's woeful performance?
Posted by: Alex at Aug 20, 2008 10:15:18 AM
Most people don't want registered sex offenders living near them. In fact our real estate agent told us there was one in a certain area, which lowered our internal valuation of the home we were looking at.
So why don't sex offenders make a killing by moving into rich neighborhoods and collecting payments from residents to leave? Sure, there is a problem of the commons, but it seems like it could be overcome.
Posted by: paul at Aug 20, 2008 10:16:58 AM
Which ethnic foods should never be paired?
Posted by: Ironman at Aug 20, 2008 10:18:44 AM
Why do presumably rational economists get caught up in religious or political nonsense?
Why do so few economists follow a fitness reoutine?
Posted by: David Rotor at Aug 20, 2008 10:20:59 AM
