Job vacancy rate is back to pre-crisis level

The Latest from Merle Hazard

National Economists Club

If you are in the DC area, you can hear me speak on November 13.  Click here for more information.

Profile of an Ec 10 Student

An amazing story, from the NY Times.

Charles Murray on Ayn Rand

A great and balanced essay.  Thanks to Alex Tabarrok for the pointer.

Head Section Leader in Ec 10

Love teaching introductory economics?  Want to live in the Boston area?  Well, then, I have a job for you.

Mean Comments

Inequality and Parenting

Click on graphic to enlarge. Source.

Congrats!

Congratulations to the recipients of the 2014 Economist Educators Best in Class Teaching Award. These three were chosen by the Board of the National Economics Teaching Association (NETA) from numerous submissions. Prizes are provided by Cengage Learning.

1^st Place       Michael Enz, Roanoke College 

               Self Grading

 2^nd Place       Sherri Wall, University of Alaska-Fairbanks

                Team Based Learning (TBL) - Econ Style!

3^rd Place       Amy Cramer, Pima Community College

                Voices on the Economy, or VOTE.

 
Winners will receive a cash award for themselves and for their departments as well as a trip to the 10^th Annual Economics Teaching Conference next month in San Diego.

You can see their submissions HERE.

Where danger lurks

A nice essay by Olivier Blanchard on the lessons we should learn from the financial crisis and Great Recession.

On Textbook Prices

NPR takes a look.  Generally, a good and balanced treatment. But they play a bit too fast and loose with the difference between high and rising.  Some of the hypotheses they suggest can explain high prices but not rising prices.

A VoxEU Course Companion

Teachers of intermediate macroeconomics will find this new book of interest:

This Vox EU Course Companion, the first in the series, is a collection of carefully selected Vox columns designed to supplement Mankiw’s Macroeconomics textbook. Vox Course Companions provide relevant examples of economic theory in action and offer thought-provoking perspectives on arguments that come up time and again in exam-style questions. They bring together analyses of economic phenomena by leading economists as they happened, while applying and comparing the suitability of competing economic theories.

The IMF on Infrastructure

The IMF endorses the free-lunch view of infrastructure spending. That is, an IMF study suggests that the expansionary effects are sufficiently large that debt-financed infrastructure spending could reduce the debt-GDP ratio over time. 

Certainly this outcome is theoretically possible (just like self-financing tax cuts), but you can count me as skeptical about how often it will occur in practice (just like self-financing tax cuts).  The human tendency for wishful thinking and the desire to avoid hard tradeoffs are so common that it is dangerous for a prominent institution like the IMF to encourage free-lunch thinking.