December 09, 2006
Intergenerational Accounting and Long-Term Policy Problems
Ok, this one is a bit misclassified in the article as a "remedy" or "solution" or fix for a long-term policy problem. Intergenerational accounting as a practice simply computes the total cost to a government of addressing a problem over time. In the case of public pensions, like Social Security, this would involve computing the total amount the government would have to pay out under current law and reasonable projections about how long people will live, and computing how much income it will have in Social Security taxes (involving assumptions about how many people will be working and how fast the economy will grow, etc.). Then you compare the two numbers. To be a long-term policy problem, almost by definition the costs have to be greater than the expected income. (If we were expecting enough money to pay for it, then it wouldn't really be a problem, would it?) In some cases, it's a really big gap - some countries have pensions obligations that are more than 2 times their annual GDP, which is an enormous number of times more than their annual pensions tax income.
For a case like pollution abatement or stopping global warming, the "intergenerational accountants" would compute the expected amount of pollution they'll have to clean up over time (and how much it would cost to do the clean up and fix anything else that goes wrong as a result), and the expected income of any pollution taxes or government funding. Again, it shows about how much the projected value of current efforts falls short of what will be needed to fix the problem.
Posted by lpowner at 08:03 PM | Comments (0)
What Is Speculation? How Do You Do It?
Entries may be shorter than most previous ones; I want to try to get as many of them done as I can before the exam.
Continue reading "What Is Speculation? How Do You Do It?"
Posted by lpowner at 07:28 PM | Comments (0)
November 20, 2006
Class 11/21 - BRING YOUR OWN COFFEE
Bring your own coffee (or tea, or whatever) to class on the 21st. We're being a bit wild and crazy. :-)
Posted by lpowner at 04:20 PM | Comments (0)
How Does the LLAP Affect States' Decision-Making? Or Is It Just a Scholarly Device?
The Law of the Least Ambitious Program (LLAP) is primarily a scholarly device used to simplify conclusion-making under some fairly common assumptions like unanimity voting. The LLAP says that under unanimity voting, the 'least ambitious' program -- the one that wants to do the least, on whatever the issue is -- will be the outcome. Unanimity voting is the most common form of decision rule in international organizations, whether de jure (by law) or de facto (in practice), so on its face this 'law' would help us predict a lot of outcomes if we know states' preferences.
Since unanimity is the default rule, and states are familiar with this, they recognize something like the functional equivalent of the LLAP. It's a generally accepted tenet of interstate bargaining that the biggest holdouts or most reluctant parties will need some inducement (via side payments or whatever) to get them to agree to anything besides their most preferred outcome. Thus there is bargaining advantage to be had from being a preference outlier under unanimity voting.
Posted by lpowner at 04:19 PM | Comments (0)
"Anthropogenic" Greenhouse Gases
'Anthropogenic' seems to be the word of the day for the last couple lectures. It means "caused or produced by humans," according to www.dictionary.com. Essentially, it's differentiating from animal-produced GHGs (e.g., the methane produced by livestock digestion [cow farts - don't laugh] and nitrates produced by animal waste decomposition [rotting cow poop]) and other naturally occuring sources. Humans are by far the largest source of GHGs, though in some developing countries the livestock component is almost as large.
Posted by lpowner at 04:14 PM | Comments (0)
November 15, 2006
Class on Thurs 11/16
As many of you probably remember, I wasn't feeling too hot on Tuesday. By the end of section 5 on Tuesday, my voice was going downhill fast, and it has continued to deteriorate since then. What you don't know is that I had a 6-month period of 'catastrophic voice loss' last year - my winter '05 class described me as sounding like "a teenaged Darth Vader crossed with a chipmunk." I'm sounding nearly as terrible now as I did then. As a result, I'm going have to go on voice rest (i.e., shut up as much as humanly possible) for a few days. Thursday in class I will likely have my laptop connected to the projector, and I'll probably give some instructions and answer some questions by typing responses onto the screen. I will also have a small microphone and speaker setup to allow me to speak at least a bit.
The good news of this is that you don't need to bring a computer for Thursday's presentations; just email me (or yourself) the ppt or bring it on a USB drive or CD.
I will also probably have my laptop out at office hours today to answer some questions via writing. I will then email you the document with my comments as a bit of compensation for having to have a bizarrely half-written, half-spoken conversation with me. But PLEASE do not avoid office hours because of this. I've done this before and know that it won't hurt me - I spent 6 months of last year doing this, actually. :-) It's a little awkward but there's no reason for you to avoid coming.
Posted by lpowner at 10:07 AM | Comments (0)
November 11, 2006
How Do All These Economists' Models of Trade Differ?
We've talked about three models of trade: Hecksher-Ohlin, Stolper-Samuelson, and Ricardo-Viner. The first two together (sometimes summarized as HOSS) produce one set of predictions, about factor-based cleavages; Prof. Sprinz discussed these models in lecture. The second, RV, produces predictions of sector-based cleavages, and we elaborated this as "Model 2" in section. Let's walk through the logic.
Continue reading "How Do All These Economists' Models of Trade Differ?"
Posted by lpowner at 11:50 AM | Comments (2)
