Quote of the day: Define Economics

Sumner:

Being a good economist is all about learning when one should think autistically, and when one should not.  If I ever figure it out I’ll let you know.

Big Bag ... too big

Adam Smith is quoted by Thought du Jour on inequality

No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable. It is but equity, besides, that they who feed, cloath and lodge the whole body of the people, should have such a share of the produce of their own labour as to be themselves tolerably well fed, cloathed and lodged.
Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations (1776), Book I, Chapter 8, paragraph 35.

I don't think this has that much to do with inequality ("fair share" or "equal share") per se as it is about poverty. You could say it's about a living wage, but the ability of working people to meet their needs "tolerably well" hardly says anything about preventing the wealthy from buying multiple McMansions.

A different view of trade vs. aid: which one do you want as your friend?

Mr Meles’s contempt for what he calls the “neoliberalism” of the West is as plain as his admiration for “generous” and “dependable” China. ... The Europeans and Americans find this galling, since they continue to pay for many of Ethiopia’s hospitals and schools, as well as handing out free food. But trade between Ethiopia and China is increasingly what matters. It was worth $800m in the first six months of this year, up by 27% on last year. China has invested $2.5 billion in Ethiopia, mostly in infrastructure.

Easterly's logic test (a test that has offended a surprising number of commenters)

2. Some nut somewhere is a fan of the economist Friedrich Hayek. Therefore it follows that: (a) since I like Hayek, I am a nut, (b) you can logically prove that Hayek  is a talk show host (c) Hayek’s ideas make possible a free society in which nuts say nutty things, but you can ignore them.

Speaking of whom, the IMF is starting to sound remarkably Austrian:

The seeds of the crisis were sown, in large part, in the five years before the crisis. Between 2003 and 2008, much of the region experienced a boom in bank credit, asset prices, and domestic demand. ... while the influx of capital boosted growth, it also led to rising imbalances and vulnerabilities.... Boom-bust credit cycles can be very costly, so it is essential to prevent credit booms from getting out of hand.

They have yet to adopt Austrian solutions, however.

In an increasingly rare moment of solidarity, the New York Senate and Assembly unanimously passed an autism insurance bill. I am uncertain of the details, but the press blurb is that it should "require coverage of evidence-based treatments like speech therapy, occupational therapy, physical therapy and applied behavior analysis. S7000B also insures that coverage for behavioral therapy cannot be denied because it is deemed educational or habilitative in nature." Gov. Paterson became the second governor after Mark Sanford to veto such legislation. Sanford was overridden. There's some good money on the second and soon to be former governor being overridden as well.

On the difficulty of trying to please everybody, or the problem with being a pragmatist, or The Obama Paradox.

Cato (via Newmark) on the impacts of McCain-Feingold:

Kenneth Vogel offers an unexpected insight into the nature of campaign finance regulation:

“[Wisconsin Senator Russell] Feingold faces an uphill battle against a novice opponent, who, perhaps ironically, has been the beneficiary of hundreds of thousands of dollars in ads attacking Feingold that would have been prohibited had McCain-Feingold remained intact.”

In other words, if Feingold’s campaign finance law had not proven to be contrary to the U.S. Constitution, he might well not be facing “an uphill battle” to serve a fourth term in Washington. The political speech that is causing Feingold problems would have been prohibited in that situation.

"Satellite dishes amid the tin-roofed shacks of El Salvador. So much for Maslow's hierarchy."


Courtesy Mankiw, Hennessey fights Goolsebee's statistics with other statistics. It makes me want to see Iron Chef Statistician: Whose descriptive methodologies will reign supreme? Video below the fold:

Shakespeare, Hemingway, and Autism

To be or not to be.
To have and have not.
Which would you prefer?

Dave Beukers - a musician, college graduate, and autistic person - writes about the difference between being autistic and having autism:

It is this distinction in my mind between “having autism” and “being autistic,” this simple change in turn of phrase, where I personally determine my attitude towards it. As a possession, it seems simply thrust upon me as an  unnecessary burden, one which I would be better off without. As a state of being, it is a lifelong journey, a beautiful cycle of try, fail, and try again from which I learn as much as I can, wherever that ends up taking me. It is this thought that has turned me from a victim to a victor and given me hope for my future, because as long as I “had” autism, autism actually had me.

To some commenters, this perspective was illuminating and liberating as they, for the first time, said "My child is autistic" and started allowing him/her to be instead of waiting for a cure to something s/he has. Among the commenters was the concern that being labeled as "being autistic" rather than "having autism" limits the potential people see in her child: "I don’t want autistic to define all of his behavior or who he is because sometimes he can just be a creative, contrary, loving, naughty, smart, sly and silly little boy – and sometimes none of this has anything to do with autism."

I feel like this is part of a set of discussions we have in society. Race and gender are on another side of a similar coin. I have yet to hear anyone argue "I'm not black. I have blackness." or "I'm not a woman. I have femininity." These are parts of who we are, but only parts. A large part of the problems of racism, sexism, and other discrimination is letting one facet of who we are or someone else is do the defining.

So how do you phrase it to accomplish both? Mormon.org is dealing with another version of the same problem with its campaign of slinging several short statements together. "I am well-read. I have a flair for decorating. I am a worker ant." Can you make that work in normal conversation? Rather than "my cousin is autistic" or "my cousin has autism," "my cousin does stand up comedy and is autistic." But you still run into that is/has problem. A different news story used the phrase "living with autism." The potential difficulty is that both the autistic person and the people living with the autistic person live with autism... in very different ways, some of which can be taken wrong.

I once tried to start up a game of "How aren't you today?"

I'm not particularly avian today.
That's interesting. I'm not single-celled.
Me neither! But I'm closer to being single-celled than I was last year.
I'm glad that diet worked out for you....

You could find a lot of common ground that way. The thing I realized, though, is that we're already pretty good at playing that game, but only in a depressing kind of way. Magazines and TV provide numerous suggestions: not pretty enough, not smart enough, not rich enough, not masculine enough, not...

Behavioral econ and psych have done a lot of work on framing effects. I wonder if there is a framing effect between being and having autism? Good luck getting a large enough sample together.