Wednesday, January 23, 2013

A primer on recent US elections

Here is the text of the article that I have written for the second issue of TSEconomist, TSE student magazine. I see similar arguments in these slides by Lane Kenworthy.




A primer on recent US elections



Like every four years, media worldwide are focused on the US Presidential elections. The results of these elections may actually be especially important this year, given the worldwide economic context. Unfortunately, the media tend to focus on the "horse race" aspects of the contest, the gaffes of the candidates and the color of their ties. It is a pity, since there are many interesting recent developments below this surface.

Let us start with the following apparently easy question: in the last elections, who has voted for the Democratic candidate (for President or Congress), and who for the Republican? With the Democrats being to the left of the Republicans on economic issues, it seems reasonable to posit that poor voters tend to favor Democrats and richer voters Republicans. But one then faces the following puzzle: Democrats have won the last several elections in the rich coastal states (the so-called blue states) while Republicans have won the poorer states of the center and the south of the country (the red states). How to explain this apparent paradox?

Historian Thomas Frank, in his book "What's the matter with Kansas?" alleges that non-economic, or cultural, issues have now acquired so much importance in voting decisions that poor voters (from Kansas and elsewhere) actually vote "against their economic interests" by supporting the more socially conservative Republican party. At the same time, some commentators (such as David Brooks from the New York Times) assert that rich voters now favor en masse the Democrats. If true, this would mean that poor US voters vote for the economically and culturally conservative Republicans, while rich voters support the more progressive Democratic party!

Gelman (2010) shows that the explanation is more subtle and interesting. Using exit poll data at the district level, together with other survey data, he first shows that poor voters do not differ much across states in terms of voting behavior, and support in their majority the Democrats. He also finds that the proportion of voters favoring the Republicans increases with income in all states! The observation that explains the puzzle is that the intensity of the relationship between voter's income and support for Republicans differs a lot among states: it is large in poor/red states but much smaller in rich/blue states. In other words, while poor voters are very much alike across the US in terms of voting behavior, it is the richer people who differ a lot and explain the red/blue geographical pattern of voting! Red (and poorer) states are won by the Republicans with the overwhelming support of the richer voters, while Democrats win the blue (and richer) states thanks to the votes of the poorer voters!

Gelman (2010) then looks at what could explain the different voting behavior of rich citizens across states. He obtains that they differ a lot in their cultural characteristics, with richer voters in the South being much more conservative (on issues such as attitude to race, abortion, religion, gun control or immigration) than richer voters on the coasts. Since the Republican party is more socially conservative than the Democrats, this non-economic dimension reinforces the attraction of Republicans for rich southern voters, while rich voters from the coastal states are torn between economic incentives (favoring the Republicans) and ideological considerations (favoring the Democrats). According to Gellman, this explains why income is a much better predictor of voting patterns in the south than along the coasts.

What influences do these considerations have on the positions taken by both parties? The political scientist Keith Poole (together with Howard Rosenthal) has been measuring the positions taken by US members of Congress literally since the beginning of the Republic (see his website at voteview.com)! He first confirms that two dimensions are necessary to represent the US parties positions: an economic one, and an ideological/cultural one. Second, he shows that parties have become more distant (or polarized) in recent elections. This polarization is actually due mostly to the Republican party, that has veered toward the more conservative extreme. In terms of Presidents, Obama is actually, according to Poole's measure, a very centrist candidate.[1] A good example of both the centrism of Obama and the move to the right of the Republicans can be found by looking at President Obama's signature legislation on health insurance ("Obamacare"), which borrows heavily from a proposition made in 1989 by the conservative Heritage Foundation, and put in practice in Massachusetts by its former governor … Mitt Romney!

Interestingly, Gelman (2010) also shows that representatives are most of the time more extreme than their constituents, so that the distribution of policy positions in Congress is more polarized than among the voting population, and that the population is not more polarized on economic issues than it used to be twenty years ago.  Political scientist Larry Bartels completes this analysis in his 2008 book "Unequal democracy". Using micro data at the district level, he shows that elected officials from both political parties are overwhelmingly responsive to the positions of the richer among their constituents, but ignore the views of poor people.

There are several potential reasons for this focus on richer citizens. To start with, they vote more often than poorer citizens. Bartels also shows that they have more knowledge of the issues at stake and that they contact much more often their representative in Congress. They also give much higher financial contributions to political parties and candidates.

Hacker and Pierson (2011) stress the importance of lobbying to explain why parties have become more polarized. They brilliantly describe the fall, since the 1970ies, of the labor lobbies (and so-called Political Action Committees, or PACs) and the concurrent rise of the more conservative lobbies funded by firms in finance and elsewhere. Finally, Hacker and Pierson make the link between the rise of money in US politics, the move to the right of parties on the economic dimension, and the staggering increase in economic inequalities (especially at the very top of the income distribution) in the US. This latter topic would deserve its own column, but I can't resist recommending the superb book by Robert Frank and Philip Cook on the subject (see references).

To conclude, if the "race horse" aspect of the Presidential contest is what is of interest to you, you can access the prediction market intrade website (http://www.intrade.com/v4/markets/contract/?contractId=743474) to see the latest odds. At the time of this writing [end July 2012], President Obama is assumed to have a 57.1% chance of reelection…

References
Bartels, Larry, Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age (2008), Princeton University Press.
Frank, Robert and Cook, Philip, The Winner-Take-All Society: Why the Few at the Top Get So Much More Than the Rest of Us (2010), Virgin books.
Frank, Thomas, What's the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America (2004), Metropolitan Books.
Gelmann, Andrew, Red state, blue state, rich state, poor state. Why Americans Vote the Way They Do (2010), Princeton University Press.
Hacker, Jacob and Pierson, Paul, Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer--and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class (2011), Simon & Schuster.
 


[1] See http://voteview.com/blog/?p=317

Hans Rosling Gapminder : 200 countries, 200 years, 4 minutes

Hans Rosling is a Swedish medical doctor, academic, statistician and public speaker. He is Professor of International Health at Karolinska Institute and co-founder and chairman of the Gapminder Foundation.

He is well known for his very lively TED presentations, where he presents in a most lively way statistics about health and income across countries and across time. I like very much his presentations for two reasons. First, he uses an extremely nice programs that shows graphically the evolution of several indicators (life expectancy, income, HIV prevalence, etc.) across time for basically any country in the world. This package is very easy to use and can be accessed at the Gapminder website. By making these indicators easily accessible for so many countries and so many years, the "big picture" very often leaps on to you. And this is the second reason why I adore his presentations: most often, they show how tremendously human lives have improved during the last decades, especially but not only for the less developed countries. This message ("for a fact-based world view" is the slogan at the top his website) clashes so much with the ever-gloomier viewpoint in Continental Europe in general and in France in particular that it is a really joy to look at his presentations.

His latest one, called "200 years, 200 countries, 4 years", is a true delight: check it on YouTube.



Sunday, January 20, 2013

Lane Kenworthy's "Consider the Evidence" blog


I have been following Lane Kenworthy's "Consider the Evidence" blog for some time. He is a Professor of Sociology and Political Science at the University of Arizona. From time to time, he posts the slides of his lectures. This is the case here. He covers many themes under the title of "Social Issues in America".

For each theme, he presents both sides of an argument, and looks into the scientific literature. Those slides then constitute nice summaries of various takes on these issues (mainly from political and sociological points of view, but with quite a bit of economics thrown into).

A few excerpts on two themes that should be of interest to French readers as well:

1. Should we legalize marijuana?

"Tobacco kills an estimated 440,000 Americans each year
Alcohol is responsible for about 100,000 deaths per year
All illegal drugs combined: about 25,000"

3. Should same-sex marriage be legal?
"Why not civil unions?
The argument that civil unions are an adequate substitute
for marriage is similar to the "separate but equal" notion
used to justify different schools, restaurants, and public
facilities for African Americans prior to the 1960s"

(and do look at the picture that follows...)


"Although it is sometimes asserted in  policy  debates  that  heterosexual
couples are inherently better parents than same-sex couples, or that the children
of lesbian or gay parents fare worse than children raised by heterosexual parents,
those assertions find no support in the scientific research literature."
(see some references on the slides)






Social issues in America

by Lane Kenworthy
Lecture slides for my “Social Issues in America” course this past fall are postedhere. The topics:
  1. Should we legalize marijuana?
  2. Do we need a carbon tax to reduce climate change?
  3. Should same-sex marriage be legal?
  4. Is political polarization hurting America?
  5. Why are some of us red and others blue?
  6. Should we reduce taxes?
  7. Should we reduce income inequality?
  8. How can we get our economy back to health?
  9. Is big business ruining America?
  10. Should we promote gender equality?
  11. What should we eat?
  12. Would less regulation make cities better?
  13. Should we limit imports and outsourcing?
  14. Should we reduce illegal immigration?
  15. When should we intervene abroad?
Lane Kenworthy | January 9, 2013 at 8:57 am | Categories: Miscellaneous | URL:http://wp.me/p8wob-24n

Wednesday, January 16, 2013

Inequality and social mobility

I am quite sympathetic with the view that larger income inequality in the US is not purely related to exogenous changes (in technological progress, in demand for labor, etc.) but is in (large?) part due to policies and thus politics. (Just compare the evolution of income inequality in the US and in France for instance). I am also interested in the relationship between income inequality and social mobility. I have found the following piece very interesting. The dynamics of social mobility/income inequality in Venice is quite astounding...




The Self-Destruction of the 1 Percent

A painting of 17th-century Venice, with a view of the banks of the Grand Canal and the Doge’s Palace, by Leandro Bassano.Photo by: Gianni Dagli Orti/Art Resource
IN the early 14th century, Venice was one of the richest cities in Europe. At the heart of its economy was the colleganza, a basic form of joint-stock company created to finance a single trade expedition. The brilliance of the colleganza was that it opened the economy to new entrants, allowing risk-taking entrepreneurs to share in the financial upside with the established businessmen who financed their merchant voyages.
Venice’s elites were the chief beneficiaries. Like all open economies, theirs was turbulent. Today, we think of social mobility as a good thing. But if you are on top, mobility also means competition. In 1315, when the Venetian city-state was at the height of its economic powers, the upper class acted to lock in its privileges, putting a formal stop to social mobility with the publication of the Libro d’Oro, or Book of Gold, an official register of the nobility. If you weren’t on it, you couldn’t join the ruling oligarchy.
The political shift, which had begun nearly two decades earlier, was so striking a change that the Venetians gave it a name: La Serrata, or the closure. It wasn’t long before the political Serrata became an economic one, too. Under the control of the oligarchs, Venice gradually cut off commercial opportunities for new entrants. Eventually, the colleganza was banned. The reigning elites were acting in their immediate self-interest, but in the longer term, La Serrata was the beginning of the end for them, and for Venetian prosperity more generally. By 1500, Venice’s population was smaller than it had been in 1330. In the 17th and 18th centuries, as the rest of Europe grew, the city continued to shrink.
The story of Venice’s rise and fall is told by the scholars Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson, in their book “Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty,” as an illustration of their thesis that what separates successful states from failed ones is whether their governing institutions are inclusive or extractive. Extractive states are controlled by ruling elites whose objective is to extract as much wealth as they can from the rest of society. Inclusive states give everyone access to economic opportunity; often, greater inclusiveness creates more prosperity, which creates an incentive for ever greater inclusiveness.
The history of the United States can be read as one such virtuous circle. But as the story of Venice shows, virtuous circles can be broken. Elites that have prospered from inclusive systems can be tempted to pull up the ladder they climbed to the top. Eventually, their societies become extractive and their economies languish.
That was the future predicted by Karl Marx, who wrote that capitalism contained the seeds of its own destruction. And it is the danger America faces today, as the 1 percent pulls away from everyone else and pursues an economic, political and social agenda that will increase that gap even further — ultimately destroying the open system that made America rich and allowed its 1 percent to thrive in the first place.
You can see America’s creeping Serrata in the growing social and, especially, educational chasm between those at the top and everyone else. At the bottom and in the middle, American society is fraying, and the children of these struggling families are lagging the rest of the world at school.
Economists point out that the woes of the middle class are in large part a consequence of globalization and technological change. Culture may also play a role. In his recent book on the white working class, the libertarian writer Charles Murray blames the hollowed-out middle for straying from the traditional family values and old-fashioned work ethic that he says prevail among the rich (whom he castigates, but only for allowing cultural relativism to prevail).
There is some truth in both arguments. But the 1 percent cannot evade its share of responsibility for the growing gulf in American society. Economic forces may be behind the rising inequality, but as Peter R. Orszag, President Obama’s former budget chief, told me, public policy has exacerbated rather than mitigated these trends.
Even as the winner-take-all economy has enriched those at the very top, their tax burden has lightened. Tolerance for high executive compensation has increased, even as the legal powers of unions have been weakened and an intellectual case against them has been relentlessly advanced by plutocrat-financed think tanks. In the 1950s, the marginal income tax rate for those at the top of the distribution soared above 90 percent, a figure that today makes even Democrats flinch. Meanwhile, of the 400 richest taxpayers in 2009, 6 paid no federal income tax at all, and 27 paid 10 percent or less. None paid more than 35 percent.
Historically, the United States has enjoyed higher social mobility than Europe, and both left and right have identified this economic openness as an essential source of the nation’s economic vigor. But several recent studies have shown that in America today it is harder to escape the social class of your birth than it is in Europe. The Canadian economist Miles Corak has found that as income inequality increases, social mobility falls — a phenomenon Alan B. Krueger, the chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, has called the Great Gatsby Curve.
Educational attainment, which created the American middle class, is no longer rising. The super-elite lavishes unlimited resources on its children, while public schools are starved of funding. This is the new Serrata. An elite education is increasingly available only to those already at the top. Bill Clinton and Barack Obama enrolled their daughters in an exclusive private school; I’ve done the same with mine.
At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, earlier this year, I interviewed Ruth Simmons, then the president of Brown. She was the first African-American to lead an Ivy League university and has served on the board of Goldman Sachs. Dr. Simmons, a Harvard-trained literature scholar, worked hard to make Brown more accessible to poor students, but when I asked whether it was time to abolish legacy admissions, the Ivy League’s own Book of Gold, she shrugged me off with a laugh: “No, I have a granddaughter. It’s not time yet.”
America’s Serrata also takes a more explicit form: the tilting of the economic rules in favor of those at the top. The crony capitalism of today’s oligarchs is far subtler than Venice’s. It works in two main ways.
The first is to channel the state’s scarce resources in their own direction. This is the absurdity of Mitt Romney’s comment about the “47 percent” who are “dependent upon government.” The reality is that it is those at the top, particularly the tippy-top, of the economic pyramid who have been most effective at capturing government support — and at getting others to pay for it.
Exhibit A is the bipartisan, $700 billion rescue of Wall Street in 2008. Exhibit B is the crony recovery. The economists Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty found that 93 percent of the income gains from the 2009-10 recovery went to the top 1 percent of taxpayers. The top 0.01 percent captured 37 percent of these additional earnings, gaining an average of $4.2 million per household.
The second manifestation of crony capitalism is more direct: the tax perks, trade protections and government subsidies that companies and sectors secure for themselves. Corporate pork is a truly bipartisan dish: green energy companies and the health insurers have been winners in this administration, as oil and steel companies were under George W. Bush’s.
The impulse of the powerful to make themselves even more so should come as no surprise. Competition and a level playing field are good for us collectively, but they are a hardship for individual businesses. Warren E. Buffett knows this. “A truly great business must have an enduring ‘moat’ that protects excellent returns on invested capital,” he explained in his 2007 annual letter to investors. “Though capitalism’s ‘creative destruction’ is highly beneficial for society, it precludes investment certainty.” Microsoft attempted to dig its own moat by simply shutting out its competitors, until it was stopped by the courts. Even Apple, a huge beneficiary of the open-platform economy, couldn’t resist trying to impose its own inferior map app on buyers of the iPhone 5.
Businessmen like to style themselves as the defenders of the free market economy, but as Luigi Zingales, an economist at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, argued, “Most lobbying is pro-business, in the sense that it promotes the interests of existing businesses, notpro-market in the sense of fostering truly free and open competition.”
IN the early 19th century, the United States was one of the most egalitarian societies on the planet. “We have no paupers,” Thomas Jefferson boasted in an 1814 letter. “The great mass of our population is of laborers; our rich, who can live without labor, either manual or professional, being few, and of moderate wealth. Most of the laboring class possess property, cultivate their own lands, have families, and from the demand for their labor are enabled to exact from the rich and the competent such prices as enable them to be fed abundantly, clothed above mere decency, to labor moderately and raise their families.”
For Jefferson, this equality was at the heart of American exceptionalism: “Can any condition of society be more desirable than this?”
That all changed with industrialization. As Franklin D. Roosevelt argued in a 1932 address to the Commonwealth Club, the industrial revolution was accomplished thanks to “a group of financial titans, whose methods were not scrutinized with too much care, and who were honored in proportion as they produced the results, irrespective of the means they used.” America may have needed its robber barons; Roosevelt said the United States was right to accept “the bitter with the sweet.”
But as these titans amassed wealth and power, and as America ran out of free land on its frontier, the country faced the threat of a Serrata. As Roosevelt put it, “equality of opportunity as we have known it no longer exists.” Instead, “we are steering a steady course toward economic oligarchy, if we are not there already.”
It is no accident that in America today the gap between the very rich and everyone else is wider than at any time since the Gilded Age. Now, as then, the titans are seeking an even greater political voice to match their economic power. Now, as then, the inevitable danger is that they will confuse their own self-interest with the common good. The irony of the political rise of the plutocrats is that, like Venice’s oligarchs, they threaten the system that created them.
© 2013 The New York Times Company.

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Sunday, January 13, 2013

Economists, Consensus and Healthy Debates


There is good news (economists agree on many things, and especially where there is large previous empirical work, as should be), but apparently also surprising news (no "saltwater" vs "freshwater" economics ???). I look forward to reading the background paper by Gordon and Dahl.




Economists, Consensus and Healthy Debates

SAN DIEGO — This is a tough time for experts. Empowered by the Internet and embittered by the sour economy, many people doubt the wisdom of expert elites. Journalism sometimes casts further doubt by seeking polarized positions that can draw an attention-grabbing debate, or by taking refuge in he-said-she-said accounts to avoid the harder job of figuring out who’s right.
Now one tribe of specialists — economists — is striking back. Concerned that the great unwashed have come to see all economic proposals as being equally valid, the University of Chicago Booth School of Business has led an effort to figure out what economists agree on, where they diverge and how certain they are about their views.
To do that, the Booth school called on reputable economists to join its panel of experts. Each week, the panelists are asked whether they agree or disagree with a particular economic idea.
“Among practicing economists, it is understood that the media and the political process paints economists as more divided than they are,” Anil K. Kashyap, a professor of economics and finance at the University of Chicago and a leader of the project, explained. “It is more sensational and maybe makes for better reading to have point-counterpoint. It seemed reasonable to provide some context. There’s a lot more settled issues than most people have a sense of.”
Dr. Kashyap cited as an example the gold standard, the monetary system in which the standard economic unit of account is a fixed weight of gold. “The gold standard is an insane idea,” he said. “I don’t know of any reputable economist who thinks it is a wise idea, but it got a lot of real political traction.”
Of the Booth panelists, 93 percent disagreed that the gold standard could improve price stability or employment.
But that is an extreme example. A paper presented this week at the annual gathering of the American Economic Association investigated the survey results in greater detail. “Based on our analysis, we conclude that there is close to full consensus among these panel members when the past economic literature on the question is large,” the authors of the paper, Roger Gordon and Gordon B. Dahl of the University of California, San Diego, wrote. “When past evidence is less extensive, differences in opinions do show up.”
But the authors did not find an ideological bias in those disagreements: “There are certainly some idiosyncratic views expressed, but we found no evidence of different camps.”
Economists, these results suggest, seek to objectively establish the truth and have a widely agreed on body of knowledge about how the economy works. In an age when it can be hard to write the word “facts” without reflexively reaching for quotation marks, that is of some comfort. But this picture of consensus among experts comes with a few caveats.
One was articulated by Paul Krugman, a Nobel Prize laureate and New York Times columnist who was at the American Economic Association meeting. Mr. Krugman accepted the idea that economists share a wide body of agreed, objective and nonideological knowledge. But he argued that when it comes to one subset of issues — business-cycle macroeconomics, or how policy should respond to booms and busts — economists are both divided and biased. That matters, Mr. Krugman rightly pointed out, because outside the academy these are among the economic issues ordinary mortals care about, and fight about, the most.
The second caveat is that consensus may be more fleeting, and therefore less valuable, than the economic high priesthood might like to think. To his credit, Dr. Kashyap revealed two issues on which the economic conventional wisdom, and his own views, have changed since the financial crisis of 2008.
One is currency controls: “Having watched all this hot money flow into these markets, I am much more sympathetic to the desire to slow things down,” he said.
The second is whether central bankers should try to pop asset bubbles, an idea toward which Dr. Kashyap has softened. “I don’t think the conventional wisdom was very good on this and I was firmly in the consensus,” he said.
These shifts suggest that it is worth looking more closely at one clear subgroup among the economists in the University of California study. Dr. Gordon and Dr. Dahl searched for, and failed to detect, ideological bias or even the subtler influence of the very distinct intellectual traditions of top U.S. universities.
But they did pick up a clear difference between men and women. “Women,” they write, “tend to be more cautious in taking a stance.” For women making their way in the 21st-century world of work, that reticence is mostly a handicap — a willingness to admit to uncertainty is one reason women are paid less and can find it difficult to break through the glass ceiling.
For the benefit of the community as a whole, though, more female economists may be needed. The quest for objective economic knowledge is surely a good thing, as is the Booth effort to map what economists agree on and where they diverge. But given how profoundly and unexpectedly the world economy collapsed in 2008, maybe a little more womanly humility about that conventional wisdom would be a good thing, too.
Chrystia Freeland is editor of Thomson Reuters Digital.
© 2013 The New York Times Company.

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EconTalk on public pensions and on Big Pharma

I like listening to podcasts when commuting or when mountain biking. Economists may be interested in the interviews conducted by Russ Roberts for EconTalk. It is a nice way to busy your mind for one hour when your body is otherwise occupied. The range of subjects is quite large, covering all fields of economics. This being said, I find Russ Roberts pretty much biased (I would say conservatist --i.e., pretty much right wing at least as seen from France) and, not sharing his political views, I have found him  not always very cogent in his remarks and interventions...

This podcast illustrates both the interest of the series and its conservatist slant. It covers an interesting topic: public pensions in the US, namely the pensions paid to state public employees. I have learnt many things from this podcast (such as, for instance, that many state public employees are not covered by the federal social security program), but I have found some interpretations given totally outlandish. At some point (34 minutes into the discussion), both Roberts and the interviewee Josuah Rauh agree that the shortfall in the funding of such plans is a Threat to Civilization!

If you'd prefer a discussion with a more left-wing perspective, listen to Marcia Angell on Big Pharma. She is not an economist but rather a medical doctor who has served as editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine. She talks about the impact of pharmaceutical companies on academic research, clinical trials and the political process. I have been most surprised by her contention that the large pharmaceutical companies produce little or no innovation but rather outsource this research to university labs. She also contends that they make an increasing amount of money doing this. If true, this means that academic researchers are very bad at extracting resources from the pharmaceutical companies to finance their research... I have no clue whether this is true and I am sure that applied economists must have looked at this. Please chip in if you have some reference to recommend!

You can check the list of EconTalk podcasts on http://www.econtalk.org/ . Each podcast is accompanied by a list of links to the materials cited in the discussion, and by highlights. You can of course subscribe to the podcasts via iTunes.

Saturday, January 12, 2013

Let's make fun of economists...

It may be fitting to start this blog focused on economics by making fun of economists... I have found the following article (published in an academic journal) really hilarious.

Life among the Econ

If you are a member of this tribe (as I am), you will recognize many features of our group. If you are a member of another academic tribe (such as our friends from IAST, the Institute for Advanced Studies in Toulouse, that groups sociologists, biologists, psychologists, political scientists, etc), well, you are now forewarned... And if you don't belong to such tribes, reading this article may change how you view scientists in general and economists in particular.

Launch post

I have started this blog as a repository of pieces of information (journal articles, scientific papers, links to podcasts, etc.) I have found of interest to me. Since I am mainly interested in economics, this will be the main subject, but by no mean the only one. I plan to mostly reproduce these pieces without adding much to them for two reasons: I don't plan on spending too much time on this blog, and I don't think my opinion would add much value added to what you could find elsewhere on the web. I plan on mainly adding a few sentences to say why I have found the piece interesting and relevant. I guess my (few) prospective readers will be friends, colleagues and students. I'll write mostly in English and will refer mainly to English articles because I mainly read in this language, but I may add a few posts in French when referring to information in that language. OK, time to get started and see how it works...