China’s economy may be growing faster, but big problems remain
China’s emergence from its covid-19 controls was meant to be the biggest economic event of the year. Instead, the reopening has turned into one of the biggest disappointments. In a recent survey by Bank of America, fund managers in Asia expressed their “fatigue and frustration” with China’s weak growth and the lack of a concerted […]
Problems with Mass EV Adoption
“I think the (EPA) standards are a disaster,” says David R. Henderson, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, a public-policy think tank based at Stanford University in California. “The thing is if someone buys an EV now, there are distorted incentives to do so. But at least people get to choose to do so. […]
Financial problems are endogenous – Econlib
Many pundits view financial crises as exogenous shocks that impact the business cycle. I’ve argued that most financial crises are actually endogenous, caused by the business cycle. There is very little evidence that financial crises have much effect on output, except when bank failures lead to currency hoarding that a central bank cannot fully accommodate […]
Ukraine Conflict Highlights Key Question for Africa: Should We Focus on the Problems of the Elite, or Those Faced by the Majority of the Population?
Yves here. This interview with Professor Youba Sokona, Vice-Chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, gives great insight into how well received (not!) the efforts of the US and EU are to enlist countries in Africa and other members of the Global South are. Sokona fleshes out some of the complaints by African and […]
#ReadWithMe: Power Without Knowledge 6: Problems with Epistocracy
In this series of posts so far, we’ve looked at Jeffrey Friedman’s definition of technocracy, the existence of naive realism and its consequences, problems of knowledge and interpretation among citizen-technocrats, and the problem of ideational heterogeneity. Can these issues be overcome by epistocrats? To recap, Friedman defines citizen-technocrats as those who believe identifying the existence […]
