United States

An expansionary peg?

LAST week, I commented on what I called an inflammatory op-ed by Paul Krugman, which argued that China's dollar peg was a beggar-thy-neighbour policy that needed to be addressed in some way. My view was that Mr Krugman may well be right, but pushing China to revalue is unlikely to generate a happ...

Four decades of declining world poverty

HERE is a fascinating new paper by Maxim Pinkovskiy and Xavier Sala-i-Martin, which attempts to track global poverty trends between 1970 and 2006. The abstract reads:We use a parametric method to estimate the income distribution for 191 countries between 1970 and 2006. We estimate the World Distr...

Prisoner's dilemma of the day

THIS comes via Scott Sumner: In the standard prisoner's dilemma, the defect, defect outcome is a little better for a player than the negative outcome in a co-operate, defect result—the defect strategy strictly dominates in the standard version, but merely dominates in the game show clip abo...

Science question of the day

Debating pay

THE ECONOMIST is currently hosting on ongoing debate on the question of whether senior executives are, on the whole, worth what they are paid. Arguing for the motion is Steven Kaplan, whose case is made easier by his focusing on the compensation of S&P 500 company executives, who have not, on...

On the volume of extremists

PEOPLE are often surprised by how candidly some individuals with extremist views speak about their extremist views. This is frequently taken as a sign of the depth of the craziness in the speakers, when actually it may reflect a mistaken assessment of the median public opinion. Via Tim Haab at En...