It is so typical of economists to analyse problems
without recourse to actual empirical evidence. Many
firms use market mechanisms for internal allocation -
I'm sure Coase could have found some. Anyone who
has worked in such firms can attest that the problem is
not transactions costs. It's
K
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on 1/2/00 2:05 am, Louis Proyect at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Trotsky himself seems like not an entirely bad sort, but Trots are
another story entirely, except maybe for the Mpls general strike. I
can't imagine
Dear Penners -
I have two questions I hope someone can
answer quickly.
(1) In what year did Milton Friedman become
president of the AEA?
(2) In what year did Lucas publish the first of
his articles laying out the theory of rational expectations?
Thanks,
Ellen Frank wrote:
I never get it when people talk about how important this
work on transaction costs is, how brilliant and insightful.
And as Coase himself noted, his paper was "much cited and little
used," at least in 1970 when he said that.
It also begins from premises so ridiculous that
At 01:14 AM 2/1/00 -0500, you wrote:
For those who are not in the know, the Coase article referred ask a simple
question. If the market is the most efficient mechanism for allocation,
why do
firms not use the market to allocate resources internally? The answer is that
using the market costs.
Coase always struck me as a mediocre figure. His so-called theorem -- which he
himself denied to be his intention -- was useful because it denied paying the need
for regulation, which was his basic theme.
His theory of the firm was interesting in so far as it pointed out a problem with
the
(2) In what year did Lucas publish the first of
his articles laying out the theory of rational expectations?
It was John Muth who thought up the theory of ratex. Lucas applied it to
macro.
Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://liberalarts.lmu.edu/~jdevine
Trotsky himself seems like not an entirely bad sort, but Trots are
another story entirely, except maybe for the Mpls general strike. I
can't imagine their net contribution to human betterment to have been
positive, but I'm willing to hear arguments to the contrary.
Doug
I've a hunch that
-Original Message-
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On Behalf Of Ellen Frank
It is so typical of economists to analyse problems
without recourse to actual empirical evidence. Many
firms use market mechanisms for internal allocation -
I'm sure Coase could have
[EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
(2) In what year did Lucas publish the first of
his articles laying out the theory of rational expectations?
It was John Muth who thought up the theory of ratex. Lucas applied it to
macro.
Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://liberalarts.lmu.edu/~jdevine
Do
Thanks to Jim Devine for the nice Thomas Palley quote:
"scholarship that proceeds within the convention is free of these burdens,
since the underlying assumptions and framework are taken for granted."
It seems to me though that length
There has been an epidemic of airliners falling "mysteriously" from the sky
in recent years...
All these problems are related to "deregulation", a policy that has been
applied across the board to the trucking, railroad and airline industry. It
has produced harried operator and maintenance crews.
Michael Hoover wrote:
Trotsky himself seems like not an entirely bad sort, but Trots are
another story entirely, except maybe for the Mpls general strike. I
can't imagine their net contribution to human betterment to have been
positive, but I'm willing to hear arguments to the
Yes, de-regulation leads to cutting costs, then cutting corners, and then
crashes. Value Jet into the Everglades is one example. It is happening in
the electric power industry, where regional and local black-outs are more
frequent, and forest fires start because tree trimming budgets have been
Louis Proyect wrote:
One of the most forceful advocates is Ted Kennedy, who
believed that Joe Six-Pack was getting cheated out of affordable air
travel. I guess neglect and stupidity about air travel runs in the Kennedy
family.
Greg Tarpinian of the Labor Research Association, in a rare act of
Peter Dorman wrote:
I've gotten flamed in the past for defending the value of Coase's article on external
costs, but I still believe it, for two reasons. First, it clarified the definition
of
an externality: a missing market.
Peter, I considere you to be a very careful thinker. Why should
Kennedy may have been influeced by Stephen Bryer, now on the Supreme Court,
who wrote a 1982 book called "Regulation and Its Reform." I think Bryer was a
staffer for a Kennedy Senate Committe on de-regulation back then. The book
is dumbed-down Alfred Kahn, which was just MC applied to
journal of political economy, 1969. friedman gave his presidential
speech in 1967.
Ellen Frank wrote:
Dear Penners -
I have two questions I hope someone can
answer quickly.
(1) In what year did Milton Friedman become
president of the AEA?
(2) In what year did
Nobody has yet volunteered to write any of the subsections. Is our
project dead? I think we would need only a page or two for an initial
draft just to get things started.
--
Michael Perelman
Economics Department
California State University
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Chico, CA 95929
530-898-5321
fax
Peter, I considere you to be a very careful thinker. Why should can do
externality be a
missing market? Doesn't the suggest that we need to think about the world
in terms of
markets or that markets are some help a natural phenomena? To me it seems
simpler to think
in a pre-Coasean fashion that
I'm doing a book review of Cyber-Marx: Cycles and Circuits of Struggle
in High-Technology Capitalism by Nick Dyer-Witheford. I'm only a third
of the way finished, but it is an excellent book so far. Much to my
delight, he even mentioned pen-l as an example of cyber activism. I
wish that I
Louis Proyect wrote:
One of the most forceful advocates is Ted Kennedy, who
believed that Joe Six-Pack was getting cheated out of affordable air
travel. I guess neglect and stupidity about air travel runs in the Kennedy
family.
But Joe Sixpack *was* getting cheated out of
G'day Brad,
And we have gone from having one serious commercial aviation accident
per 140 million miles flown in 1970 to having one serious commercial
aviation accident per 1.4 billion miles flown today. You can indict
capitalism for many reasons, but an increased likelihood of dying in
an
Don't fly to Chico from San Francisco. Going to New York is cheaper. It wasn't
before dereg. So it was not beneficial to all consumers.
Brad De Long wrote:
Don't any of you fly anywhere on vacation?
--
Michael Perelman
Economics Department
California State University
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
I am not denying that transactions are costly. Or there are other costs
associated with different institutions of allocation, including the market. What
I am objecting to is logic of this sort.
Transactions costs imply firms
Therefore firms imply transactions costs.
How do we measure
[EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
But maintaining control over employees is a transaction cost under the
Coasian theory and its modern elaborations. It's usually called
"monitoring
costs" or preventing "opportunism" (i.e. workers doing what makes their
lives bearable rather than what they are told to
And we have gone from having one serious commercial aviation accident
per 140 million miles flown in 1970 to having one serious commercial
aviation accident per 1.4 billion miles flown today. You can indict
capitalism for many reasons, but an increased likelihood of dying in
an airliner crash
Michael Perelman wrote:
Peter Dorman wrote:
I've gotten flamed in the past for defending the value of Coase's article on
external
costs, but I still believe it, for two reasons. First, it clarified the
definition of
an externality: a missing market.
Peter, I considere you to be a
You are, of course, referring to a different article by Coase, than I referred to.
The Coase theorem of 1960 which you refer to here is a different fish altogether. Here
Coase assumes that transactions costs are zero. But he also assumes that all income
effects
are zero. It is this article that
Rod Hay wrote:
Classification is a useful prescientific exercise.
Yes. It is also a highly useful heuristic gimmick (which is perhaps part
of what you mean) and a good (essential) aid to memory, as well as
to convenient storage of information (in a computer or a card file,
what have you).
G'day Brad,
And we have gone from having one serious commercial aviation accident
per 140 million miles flown in 1970 to having one serious commercial
aviation accident per 1.4 billion miles flown today. You can indict
capitalism for many reasons, but an increased likelihood of dying in
an
Don't fly to Chico from San Francisco. Going to New York is
cheaper. It wasn't
before dereg. So it was not beneficial to all consumers.
But there are a lot more of us who want to fly from San Francisco to
New York. Bentham would approve...
Brad DeLong
Michael Perelman wrote:
Nobody has yet volunteered to write any of the subsections. Is our
project dead? I think we would need only a page or two for an initial
draft just to get things started.
--
I would be willing to write something on Mexico or Latin America
generally, if noone
Here is the web address for the CCPA alternative budget etc.
Cheers, Ken Hanly
Subject: CCPA Update: Alternative Federal Budget 2000
Date: Tue, 01 Feb 2000 12:30:27 -0500
From: "ccpa" [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
February 1, 2000
Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives Update:
Hi again, Brad,
Seems to me that air safety is one place where the market gives
airline executives and airplane manufacturing and maintenance
executives exactly the right incentives: people aren't going to fly
airplanes or airlines that crash regularly...
They only have to make sure they don't
Brad De Long [EMAIL PROTECTED] 02/01/00 12:47PM
You can indict
capitalism for many reasons, but an increased likelihood of dying in
an airliner crash is not one of them...
CB: What are some of the many reasons for which you would indict capitalism ?
CB
At 09:59 AM 2/1/00 -0800, you wrote:
Yes, de-regulation leads to cutting costs, then cutting corners, and then
crashes. Value Jet into the Everglades is one example. ...
I think it's a mistake to think of deregulation as a simple one-dimensional
phenomenon (a movement toward greater freedom
Hi again, Brad,
Seems to me that air safety is one place where the market gives
airline executives and airplane manufacturing and maintenance
executives exactly the right incentives: people aren't going to fly
airplanes or airlines that crash regularly...
They only have to make sure they don't
I wrote:
4. I think that in general there are two dimensions to government
regulation of industry:
(a) industry self-regulation, like my Dad's old organization (the Audit
Bureau of Circulations), which makes sure that newspapers don't lie about
how many folks read them in order to be able to
What has been the effect of deregulation on service to smaller centers? Is travel
to low traffic
areas much more expensive, or non-existent. When we had more regulation in Canada
permission to serve lucrative routes was contingent upon service on other routes or
centers that were not as
See Robert Kuttner's EVERYTHING FOR SALE for an interesting long-view inspection
of the rate of price declines in the airline industry. His data shows dramatic
decrease in the rate of price drop before the onset of deregulation in the 1980s
airline industry. He essentially argues that pre
Jeff Sommers:
airline industry. He essentially argues that pre deregulation oligopoly
pricing
generated higher profits which in turn generated sufficient R D to
revolutionize
tech far faster resulting in significantly faster price drops
This squares with the analysis made by Pat Devine
Try reading Breyer's "Closing the Vicious Circle", which we're using in class this
year. It's pretty scary to think that this guy is one of the "leftwing" supremes.
Peter
Eugene Coyle wrote:
Kennedy may have been influeced by Stephen Bryer, now on the Supreme Court,
who wrote a 1982 book
The airlines MUST discriminate -- i. e. must screw business flyers. That's the
only reason for "A Saturday Night Stay is required." If the airlines couldn't
enforce that profits would drop sharply, followed by a shrinkage of capacity, and
then a cut-back of the discounted tickets.
The
Yes, Brad, the airline execs don't want to have an accident, and they hope they
won't if they cut corners, but they are sure profits will benefit if they do
cut corners.
gene Coyle
Brad De Long wrote:
G'day Brad,
And we have gone from having one serious commercial aviation accident
per
You do!
Ian
-Original Message-
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On Behalf Of Michael Perelman
Sent: Tuesday, February 01, 2000 10:38 AM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: [PEN-L:15908] Are we doing something right?
I'm doing a book review of Cyber-Marx: Cycles
Date sent: Tue, 01 Feb 2000 16:50:27 -0500
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
From: Louis Proyect [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject:[PEN-L:15929] Airplanes falling out of the sky
Send reply to: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
It may in interesting to look
I have a simple question about safety. There have been quite a few accidents
among the commuter lines, which replaced the majors, which used to serve
places, such as Chico. Has the safety record really improved that much when
the commuters are factored in? I don't know.
Brad De Long wrote:
At 04:35 PM 2/1/00 -0600, you wrote:
It would appear, by the way, the deregulation of the trucking
industry in Canada has been much more detrimental in both the
bankruptcy of numberous trucking companies and a major decline
in road safety, particularly with low-wage competition with Mexican
A while ago the _JEP_ had a short symposium on "Austrian" economics:
Harvey Rosen wrote a sympathetic critique of the Austrian school, and
Leland Yeager responded. This seemed to work: communication was
accomplished. The selection of Harvey as someone definitely in the
establishment but not
That post on teenage Trotskyist was accidentally sent to this list. Sorry
about that.
Louis Proyect
Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org/
Special Issue On the Irving-Lipstadt Libel Trial
__
The Internet Anti-Fascist: Saturday, 29 January 2000
Vol. 4, Number 9 (#383)
For them it is as important to criticise Bradley as it is to criticise
Haider, in fact even more so. The proof of this dogmatist distortion of
marxism will be an inability to discuss any developing concrete moves that
link theory with practice.
Chris Burford
Washington Post, February 1, 1987
Michael Perelman wrote:
Don't fly to Chico from San Francisco. Going to New York is
cheaper. It wasn't
before dereg. So it was not beneficial to all consumers.
The airfare index of the CPI has risen at roughly twice the rate of
the overall CPI since dereg - almost 11% in the last year, vs.
[Gore has the answer to airplane safety - prayer!]
THE WHITE HOUSE
Office of the Vice President
For Immediate Release February 1, 2000
Jim Devine wrote:
I read some stats in LBO awhile back that indicated that price-deregulation
didn't really lead to lower airline ticket prices. Doug?
Yup, this is a long-standing LBO obsession. See other post. The dereg
partisans like to quote real fares per seat-mile, which are down
since
The airline industry is strange. Wild price fluctuations, bucket shop
seats, open jaws, student fares, standby etc. I once bought an open
ended ticket from Vancouver to LA return for $C50. Another flight over
from Asuncion Paraguay to Leticia in Colombia was $US800 even though it
is a shorter
Doug Henwood wrote:
[Gore has the answer to airplane safety - prayer!]
Look Tinkerbell! We Can Fly! Thinking will make it so!
SP
It seems to me that "radical economics" does not denote a coherent entity
the way "Austrian economics" does. There are too many perspectives and
methodologies. Radicals tend to agree on objectives (loosely) and they
share a dislike for the status quo in both the economics profession and
the
Yes, and de-regulated airfare has gone up much faster than electric
power in the CPI.\
Gene
Doug Henwood wrote:
Michael Perelman wrote:
Don't fly to Chico from San Francisco. Going to New York is
cheaper. It wasn't
before dereg. So it was not beneficial to all consumers.
The airfare
If only they'd de-regulate prayer! (Or is it schools they need to deregulate
so we can pray in them?)
Doug Henwood wrote:
[Gore has the answer to airplane safety - prayer!]
THE WHITE HOUSE
Office of the Vice President
It seems to me that "radical economics" does not denote a coherent entity
the way "Austrian economics" does. There are too many perspectives and
methodologies.
"Post-Marxist economics" then?
Brad DeLong
Jim Devine wrote:
I read some stats in LBO awhile back that indicated that price-deregulation
didn't really lead to lower airline ticket prices. Doug?
Yup, this is a long-standing LBO obsession. See other post. The dereg
partisans like to quote real fares per seat-mile, which are down
since
I think a number of us found it interesting.
Louis Proyect wrote:
That post on teenage Trotskyist was accidentally sent to this list. Sorry
about that.
Louis Proyect
Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org/
--
Michael Perelman
Economics Department
California State University
Chico,
sounds like Peter Dorman should play the role of Harvey Rosen
At 05:48 PM 02/01/2000 -0800, you wrote:
It seems to me that "radical economics" does not denote a coherent entity
the way "Austrian economics" does. There are too many perspectives and
methodologies. Radicals tend to agree on
Some time ago, I spoke with Tim Taylor, editor of the Journal of Economic
Perspectives, about the possibility of a survey of radical economic.
Don't tell Brad DeLong about it, but Tim seemed receptive. My intention
was to make it some sort of collective project.
I was hoping that our text
I think Brad De Long's idea of a JEP mini-symposium on "radical
economics" is an excellent one, which I appreciate.
One possibility to consider: I edited a book published in 1995 entitled
*Heterodox Economic Theories: True or False* (the title was a take-off on
one of Mark Blaug's books).
At 20:08 01/02/00 -0500, you wrote:
For them it is as important to criticise Bradley as it is to criticise
Haider, in fact even more so. The proof of this dogmatist distortion of
marxism will be an inability to discuss any developing concrete moves that
link theory with practice.
Chris Burford
There has been an epidemic of airliners falling "mysteriously" from the sky
in recent years. The best known incidents were TWA 800 which went down over
Long Island Sound and the Egyptian plane that supposedly was brought down
through the suicidal act of a pilot.
Yesterday Alaskan Airlines Flight
I have found Alaska airlines to be the most comfortable that I had
experienced. I don't get the impression that they are cutting corners. That
doesn't mean they're not -- only that is far too obvious with some of the
others.
One of the major corners has been the treatment of airline mechanics,
Sunday's Superbowl was one of the best I've seen...in terms of its raw
drama the last quarter of play.
Today, Monday, a good many of your students will return from watching it
and thinking about it only in terms of that raw drama...with maybe a bit of
enthusiasm for the home team...
There
The History of Mexico is the History of Class Struggle.
Mexico's Hope. James Cockroft. MR Press.1999.435 pgs.
This is the best general introduction to Mexican history and
political economy available in English. Cockroft's book is a sweeping
history of Mexico from the pre-colonial era to
Threepenny Review, Winter 2000
MEMOIR
The Revolutionary as Bon Vivant
by Irene Oppenheim
"Do what you wiIl, this Lifes a Fiction
And is made up of Contradiction"
William Blake, "The Everlasting Glory"
WHEN I WAS eleven, I began spending my summers at a New Jersey retreat run
by a small
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