Notes on Economics
Contents
Proving the Central Limit Theorem
Clever Central Limit Theorem proof: If you have a sequence Xn of random variables, start with a Normal sequence Zn with Xn's means and variances. The Theorem for Zn is trivial. The Lindeberg trick is to swap Xn for Zn one term at a time.
Econ Video Clips
Econ Media Library @EconMedia on Twitter. https://twitter.com/EconMedia Mix of television, movies, comedy specials, or news clips that can be used to #TeachEcon. If you've got recommendations, @ me! Created by @Wootenomics
"The Economics of Seinfeld" site, video clips indexed by concept (large site): https://yadayadayadaecon.com/index/
Market Failure
"Contrary to popular belief, however, market failure theory is also a reproach to every existing government. How so? Because market failure theory recommends specific government policies–and actually-existing governments rarely adopt anything like them."
Bryan Kaplan. https://twitter.com/bryan_caplan/status/1356280068927086601
Other
Florian Ederer @florianederer Literature controversies in econ ranked
1) Minimum wage 2) Inflation-government debt 3) Markups 4) Immigration wage effects 5) Inequality measurement 6) Wealth & corporate taxation 7) Common ownership 8) Monopsony 9) Spending-educational outcomes 10) Innovation-competition
Professor Michael Huemer's I Love Corporations at Fake Nous:
I have had personal experience with individuals, corporations, and government. All three are, of course, sometimes unsatisfactory. But my experience with large corporations is way better than my experience with either individuals or government — better from the standpoint of my ending up feeling satisfied, or being made better off by interacting with them.
Socialism
It really is not unfair to compare the early Nazis to the current Democratic Party, and fascists generally to the Clinton Wing. The early Nazis were a mix of nationalist members who hated big business and wanted to kill it, and nationalist members who wanted the government to control big business, but didn't care who got the profits. They all hated Jews, of course, but half of that hate was that Jews were, they thought, too strong in business (the other half was that other Jews wanted to destroy traditional society). In 1934 Hitler purged the business-killers. This bodes ill for the Berniebros.
More generally, the fascist idea was that it was fine for business to make big profits, so long as the businesses obeyed every command of the government. That's the regulatory state, except that it used executive orders instead of legislative statutes, a slow process of bureaucratic regulation-issuing, and legal opinions the courts create to bypass legislation.
That's just like the Clinton Wing. They love millionaires, and millionaires love them. They do require the millionaires to do their bidding, however, in matters they are about like abortion insurance coverage, affirmative action, small toilet tanks, etc.
