I time-traveled here from 1987 to say: You future people like weird things

(Continuing from my previous post, Does the  idea of sustainability survive sustained inquiry?)
Sustainability means preserving good things for future generations.  But as Bob Solow notes, we have no idea what the preferences of future generations are; we are likely to think they are weird.  After all, if someone in 1800 were trying to make people [...]

Does the idea of sustainability survive sustained inquiry?

In Bob Solow’s 1993 “Economist’s Perspective on Sustainability“, it survives as a “necessarily vague, but useful” idea.  He notes that sustainability has been conflated with other moral ideas about environmental protection, but that sustainability itself does not necessarily mean preserving species or wilderness.  Instead it is about “distributional equity” between the present and the future.  [...]

Democracy is Cool once more

After the American Revolution, democracy was the new thing that all the cool Americans were doing.
In the 1960’s and 70’s, a large youth cohort and a constitutional amendment lowering the voting age brought down the age of the median political participant.  Political policies and styles became more in tune with the youngest generation which is [...]

Epistemological Modesty and the Stimulus

David Brooks’ NYT column introduces a useful framework for evaluating the stimulus and economic policy.  In the short term this a welcome exhortation for less grandiose plans.  In the medium term, the stimulus and bailout packages will provide an excellent test for the potential of government planning.  I hope people will look back two and [...]

The Future: Like the Past, but cooler

Making predictions about the future is a notoriously tricky business.  It is often done by extrapolating from past trends.  As often as this method fails us, its hard to imagine a better heuristic than the belief that the future will be like the past, only more so.
Extrapolating current trends in combinations that should be obvious [...]

Economics Subfield Interests

Like all areas of inquiry in the modern era, economics has been broken off into progressively narrower subfields, so that as the sum of human knowledge expands people can still feel as if they have mastered their “field”, however narrowly it has been defined.
With a healthy supply of youthful arrogance and naiveté, I hope I [...]

Romney in France

Before he was a Governor or a Presidential candidate, Mitt Romney was a young Mormon.
He did what most young Mormons do, and went on a mission; but he was more unusual in where his mission brought him.
Like yours truly, he was 20 and living in France.
Luckily for me, the French have become both more polite [...]

Sappy answer to above post

I’d like to think that my money can’t do anything terribly important on its own, but that it will be lubricant or catalyst that helps make important things happen better, faster and with fewer explosions.
I hope my wealth will reflected in the things I learned, the places I went, the friends I met, and the [...]