A major pinnacle of libertarian economic thought concerns the market’s role in providing public goods. Argentina is probably one of the world’s hottest laboratories for putting the theory to the test at the moment. Your favorite road trip across the nation’s highways might have to wait for a few years as a result, though.
Continue readingCategory Archives: Economics
Dubai redux
There is a lot of coverage on Dubai and the United Arab Emirates these days given the Iran War. Although I am trying to moderate my news intake, I read Janan Ganesh’s “We’ll always have Dubai” and Richard Florida’s “Could this be end of Dubai?” and have some thoughts after the jump.
Continue readingBillionaires and limitarianism
Once in a while even silly “thought provoking” articles require a riposte. Michael Strain’s defense of billionaires is one of these. You can read it in the FT, and also consider the hundreds of unanimously critical comments. Reading it made me think about the book I am currently reading which calls for very tight limits on wealth accumulation: “Limitarianism”, much more on that below.
Development finance as a discipline
I stumbled over this interesting article in Development Southern Africa. Its authors, Dobbin and Lloyd explore whether development finance should be treated as an emerging, separate discipline in academia. An engaging read, even if inconclusive.
Harlem revisited in books
Harlem is on my mind again these days as I am about half-way into Colson Whitehead’s Harlem Shuffle. A heist on the iconic Hotel Theresa is at the heart of it. Almost exactly ten years ago to the day, I put up a post on this blog recounting some of the building’s history. One aspect I wrote about–the Cuban delegation’s visit to New York in 1960–is beautifully laid out in Simon Hall’s Ten Days in Harlem, which I recommend to everyone. It’s amazing how such an important event in world history played out in this very building up the road from where we lived for a year between 2013-14. Continue reading
Getting back to work – debt in South Asia
My post on debt restructuring from earlier this year has kept me thinking. I sit in a line of work that deals with these issues every day, from an IFI and banking sector point of view. Lots has happened since February, and I have regularly written professional updates on the situations in Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh, which face(d) variable degrees of balance of payment crises.
Alas, my day-to-day does not allow for a deeper soul-searching and analysis of the underlying forces and trends that also matter in this debate. Given that I studied under people very critical of IFIs (and calling myself a heterodox economist if pushed for a self-characterization), I feel obliged to look a little deeper, academically speaking, into the political economy of these crises. Continue reading
Whither debt relief
The FT ran an opinion piece a few days ago that suggests the old arguments for debt cancellation in Africa no longer apply. Continue reading
FIRE
I rarely write on anything else than Tokyo on this blog anymore. But I have previously used this blog to reflect on some more personal financey topics, especially in this fiery treatise arguing against our real estate obsession which got a good deal of clicks.
Other posts in this category included those on impact investing and the state of economics education, among others. Anyway, this just to refresh my mind and gather some courage to stray from the all-too-familiar Tokyo and Yangon posts this blog has seen over the last few years.
FIRE (short for “financial independence, retire early”): First off, I am not among the initiated, and do approach the movement with some skepticism. I hope that such transparency upfront creates some goodwill among the believers. Continue reading
Socializing and expropriation
Berlin has been making waves in the global news with a campaign to expropriate a large private owner of apartments. Some uncollected thoughts after the jump. Continue reading
What is wrong with our real estate obsession?
We are obsessed with real estate. Dinner parties in big cities in the West are often dominated by talk of a new house, an old one that was just sold, or another one that somehow, sadly, fell through.
