What I Do

Some wonderful popular pieces about econ lately.
  • This American Life on maybe just giving poor people cash instead of training/cows/whatever.
  • Jacob Goldstein, reporter for above story, in the NYT. 
  • Blattman, professor interviewed for the above, grad school peer of mine, discussing the same, and the broader idea that not running the experiment is the crazy/immoral thing to do.

  • Stiglitz in the NYT on inequality and the 50th anniversary of the march on Washington. He describes the Chicago school of free-market economics thus: "unemployment (if it existed) was the fault of workers." I distinctly remember the moment in Advanced Macroeconomics as an undergrad where the professor said essentially the same (that there is no such thing as involuntary unemployment). I thought it was stupid at the time, and I still do.

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