By Marcela Valdes Tomorrow morning is the official premiere of One Book, One Twitter (#1b1t). For anyone just arriving, huffing and puffing, to the shindig, we're reading American Gods, by Neil Gaiman. So now that we know what we're reading, we still have to answer the question: how do you get t...

(I'm calling these "lab notes" because One Book, One Twitter is One Big Experiment. I hope you'll all contribute to these notes.) Last night a tweet came in over the #1b1t transom. The content of the tweet—that the writer had barely started reading American Gods before having to go to sleep—isn'...

American Gods, by Neil Gaiman. About a month ago I proposed a scheme, that everyone in the world (or at least, those of us with access to the Internet) all read one book together this summer. To my great delight and satisfaction, thousands of people said, in effect, "Hell Yeah." I further propo...

Cross-Posted from the Crowdsourcing Blog I have a dream. An idea. A maybe great notion. Actually, as Auggie March might say, "I got a scheme." What if everyone on Twitter read the same book at the same time and we formed one massive, international book club? Usually such programs are organized b...

I woke up this morning, stumbled downstairs and flipped open my laptop. Who was there to greet me but an old—and estranged—friend. As often happens in these scenarios, the conversation quickly took an awkward turn. Me: "Oh my God! It's blog! Hey there ... it's been, like, soooo long." Blog: "Yes...

The New York Times bemoans the lack of support that the existing trade regime gets from the field of Democratic presidential candidates: Many Americans are experiencing economic anxiety. Wages for most workers are going nowhere. It is a sad fact that despite enormous gains in productivity over t...

"The US must do more to eliminate billions of dollars in illegal subsidies to its cotton farmers" writes the FT. Who says? A dispute resolution panel of the World Trade Organization. And guess what: the U.S. may well grumble and choose to appeal, but in the end, it will have to act. Just as it ...

"The US must do more to eliminate billions of dollars in illegal subsidies to its cotton farmers" writes the FT. Who says? A dispute resolution panel of the World Trade Organization. And guess what: the U.S. may well grumble and choose to appeal, but in the end, it will have to act. Just as it ...

I was at a conference yesterday on “Global Commerce and the National Interest” convened by Robert Kuttner and the Sloan Foundation, which brought together many of the luminaries on the left-wing of the Democratic party. I was asked to make some comments, and I organized them under the heading “W...

Two things happened in the last twenty-four hours which convinced me that the econ-blogosphere is healthy and will keep on going strong--at least my end of it. One is the outpouring of good arguments from all over (see for example here and here) against someone's rash statement that the econ-bl...

At this rate, in any case? Two things happened in the last twenty-four hours which made me wonder if some of the best economics blogs may be on their way out. First, an economist with a very high-quality blog told me that he was not sure if he had made the right decision by starting it. He said...

My wife and I are huge fans of Radiohead (she turned me into one). Here is a picture from the fourth row from their Boston concert to prove it. (My wife has much better pictures from that concert. In fact, she used one of Thom Yorke from that concert as the background for her laptop until I...

Do you want to understand how globalization reshapes wealth and opportunity in the world? Look no further than soccer--the sport that everyone in the world (besides the U.S.) calls football. I know, this is not an original idea. There is at least one best seller on the topic, but while it is a r...

It's the day after Labor Day, which means it is the first day of orientation for incoming MPAID students. Which also means that I have to give them a talk about the program and how it all fits together. In explaining our extensive and demanding curriculum, I emphasize that development is too imp...

The slave trade, whereby able-bodied Africans were shipped to other parts of the world and sold into slavery, was a despicable economic institution for sure. But did it also have long-run effects on the economic development of African countries? Yes, is the surprising answer of Nathan Nunn: I c...

Some years ago I served on a committee at the Kennedy School charged with evaluating the quantity and quality of the School's published output. One of the exercises I remember doing is to correlate the scholarly output of individual faculty members with their op-ed and similar publications. My h...

Here is a question for the economics student: Are higher world food prices good or bad for the world's poor? If you have been paying attention to the advocates of the Doha "Development" Round, who have trumpeted the benefits that the poor would get from agricultural liberalization in the advanc...

I have never had as many responses to a post as I have had to this one. And the results are in. The new economist blogger you most want to see is Joe Stiglitz, followed by Daron Acemoglu. Here is the full tabulation, as of this morning: Following up on my promise, I have written to both Stig...

Once in a while you come across a paper that makes you nod in agreement and go "yes!" with every sentence you read. Robert Driskill's Deconstructing the Argument for Free Trade is such a paper. Driskill is a distinguished economist who knows the theory of comparative advantage as well as anyone ...

Well, that includes me too. Here is an excellent primer from Stephen Cecchetti's on the crisis and the mechanics of how the Fed and the ECB have intervened. And why did the crisis happen when it did? It is natural to ask whether there is some specific reason for these events to occur when they...

Bill Easterly has trouble not just with foreign aid; apparently the problem is with the whole idea of "development" itself. His most recent article in Foreign Policy magazine starts ominously: A dark ideological specter is haunting the world. It is almost as deadly as the tired ideologies of t...

Bill Easterly has trouble not just with foreign aid; apparently the problem is with the whole idea of "development" itself. His most recent article in Foreign Policy magazine starts ominously: A dark ideological specter is haunting the world. It is almost as deadly as the tired ideologies of t...

Martin Wolf has written the best thing I have seen in a very long time on the momentous transformation the world economy is undergoing. It is capitalism, not communism, that generates what the communist Leon Trotsky once called “permanent revolution”. It is the only economic system of which tha...

Many many years ago when I was a recently minted assistant professor, I heard Gary Hufbauer tell an anecdote at a conference on international trade. A government economist is called in by his superior, who tells him "Look, I have to make a case for this policy in front of Congress, and I need a ...

While on the subject of immigration, I should have mentioned the superb monograph by Lant Pritchett. Lant makes an excellent case for expanded immigration in rich countries, while he makes clear that he is fully aware of the social and distributional consequences. The book is especially good in...