All economics this week, though I’ve got some financial planning posts lined up for the near future.
- Alex Tabarrok links to the 80,000 hours career guide: I started watching the videos, I’m predisposed to liking them since I think earning to give is one of the best ideas to come to charitableness in a while. Love these graphs that Alex included:
- David Henderson on rent control: he draws a great (non-)parallel to gasoline price controls.
The simple fact that we got gasoline last week gave us no inherent advantage over others in getting it this week. We had to line up yet again. But, with rent control, the fact that we had a rent-controlled apartment last year gave us a huge advantage over those looking for apartments this year.
- Timothy Taylor with a post reflecting on the state of fossil fuels: paints a picture that suggests we might not be running out of fossil fuels as fast as everyone always assumes. We seem to be finding new oil at least as fast as we use it up. I wonder if that’s good or bad.
- Scott Sumner on Fed President James Bullard: they really do need to figure out that whole reconciling dot plots vs. market expected inflation thing, though. As a side-note, it seems more and more smart people outside of economics are buying the story that NIRP is just an extension of ZIRP and LIRP (is that a thing?).
“Look, monetary policy is not about interest rates, it’s about hitting the dual mandate. There is no evidence that we need to dramatically adjust interest rates going forward to hit the dual mandate, so don’t pretend there is. The Fed should not be trying to ‘normalize’ interest rates, it should be trying to maintain high employment and 2% PCE inflation.”
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