Even before publication, the book SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance is the topic of hot debate - on economists’ blogs, including Krugman’s, on Amazon, and, of course, on environmental sites.  SuperFreakonomics’ authors are Steven D. Levitt, a professor of economics at the University of Chicago and Stephen J. Dubner, a former writer and editor at The New York Times Magazine.

The heat was generated by Chapter 5 of the book, which deals with global…

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I am being enriched by a vast expansion of government that will impoverish you and your family, and shrink the size of the economy in the long run.

Across the country, and probably where you live, home values have declined by 20 percent or more. But my house, located where many federal employees live, has lost much less value. Indeed, the tax assessor claims (with some exaggeration) that my home’s value is down only a few percent over 2007 and 2008,…

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Obama’s stimulus package is the problem, not the solution. No one wants to make any hard decisions until they see what goodies they may get from Obama’s trillion-dollar stimulus package, which many economists oppose for good reason. The result is a deepening credit freeze that makes it difficult for small businesses to meet their payrolls, and delays passage of state budgets.

All the talk of a stimulus is resulting in a logjam in state legislatures as legislators put off hard choices…

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Contrary to claims by the Obama administration, there is no consensus among economists for a “stimulus” package, much less the trillion-dollar pork-filled “stimulus” package being crafted by Obama and liberal Congressional leaders. (Many economists oppose it). Even the liberal Washington Post, which has not endorsed a Republican for President since 1952, admitted this today: “Fiscal stimulus is far from a sure-fire remedy. Economists disagree about the efficacy of every pump-priming effort from the New Deal to last year’s tax rebates. In general,…

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So-called “stimulus packages” don’t revive the economy, but that hasn’t stopped President-elect Obama from pushing a budget-busting $850 billion stimulus package. Japan tried a similar approach in the 1990s, trying to revive its economy after a real estate bubble imploded, by spending billions on new roads, airports, and bridges-to-nowhere. That period has been called the “Lost Decade,” since all the spending just led to economic stagnation and decay.

The Obama campaign claims that virtually no economists oppose his stimulus plan, but…

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It’s timely and needed — a new publication gives leading trade economists’ views on “What world leaders must do to halt the spread of protectionism.” In the publication by VoxEU.org (run by The Centre for Economic Policy Research), all of the experts caution that in times of recession, countries often attempt to fend off competition by trade protectionism; to do so, however, would be a huge mistake and plunge the global economy further downward, particularly hurting developing countries.

Instead, these experts argue, deal…

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