Re: Keynes in China
but being in china for 2 summers. as i can see that as time goes on, they're becoming a bit more liberal on things At 06:20 PM 2/4/01 -0800, you wrote: On Sun, 4 Feb 2001, fabio guillermo rojas wrote: A new graduate student in my department told me that at Beijing University, econ undergraduates are not taught Keynesian economics - they get a good dose of Marxism and then they get hooked up with monetarism!! Can anybody else verify this? Is China liberalized enough so that students are allowed to openly be taught free market economics? I have some Chinese grad student friends and I get the impression that what you say is correct. But at the beginning of every one of these free-market economics books, my friends tell me that the government prints a short "caveat emptor". This basically states that the free-market ideas in the book are all wrong, and that the students are being taught about these ideas so they can see (i) how wrong these ideas really are, and (ii) how great Marx is in comparison. Alex Robson UC Irvine
Re: lobbying as a public goods problem
Wei wrote "Reading Jonathan Rauch's _Government's End: Why Washington Stopped Working_ (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1891620495) made me wonder how special-interest lobbies solved the public goods problem." See Mancur Olson's The Logic of Collective Action and The Rise and Fall of Nations, both of which are about precisely this question and the implications of the answer. Alex -- Dr. Alexander Tabarrok Vice President and Director of Research The Independent Institute 100 Swan Way Oakland, CA, 94621-1428 Tel. 510-632-1366, FAX: 510-568-6040 Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Externalities, Coase
Alex Robson wrote: I have been having a running argument with someone about externalities. My argument was that, even if Coasian bargaining were to take place, the externality doesn't go away - it still exists [in the sense that one person's action directly enters the utility function of the other person] - but that it's just no longer Pareto-relevant. The other person has been arguing that, once Coasian bargaining has taken place, the externality *no longer exists*. ... I recall getting stuck in this same debate before. My habit was the same as yours. It seems to be a theorist/policy person difference. Policy people say that there is this presumption out there that an externality implies a market failure, which justifies government intervention. So they do not want the word associated with situations where intervention is probably just justified. To a theorist, it makes little sense to define words in terms of whether there is a market failure, for the simple reason that whether there is a market failure is a complex feature of a larger context. You instead want common words to describe simple local features. You want to be able to talk about the major features of an economic situation without having to analyze it in enough detail to figure out if there is a market failure. Robin Hanson [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://hanson.gmu.edu Asst. Prof. Economics, George Mason University MSN 1D3, Carow Hall, Fairfax VA 22030- 703-993-2326 FAX: 703-993-2323
