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The views expressed by me on this blog are mine alone at the time of posting and do not necessarily reflect the views of any organization with which I am associated.

Monday, November 08, 2004

Econoblog at the Wall Street Journal

Two of the economics profession's best bloggers are paired up at the Wall Street Journal this week: John Irons of Argmax for the liberal point of view and Tyler Cowen of Marginal Revolution for the libertarian point of view. Their first topic is Social Security, and Tyler references a couple of my earlier posts (and as an excerpt, here) to support his arguments.



This is a great idea for an online forum by the WSJ. At the bottom of the page, the topic for tomorrow's discussion is listed as "outsourcing and its effect on global trade." This must be a typo--the first order concern is not about impact of outsourcing on global trade per se. What we care about is the impact of both global trade and outsourcing on the level and distribution of consumer welfare. I suspect that's how the discussion will go.

1 comment:

ed said...

I find John Irons' contributions to the WSJ discussion to be extremely strange. He takes issue with Tyler calling for a smaller, welfare-like version of social security. Then he procedes to list the benefits of social security, all of which seem exactly like what we would want from a welfare program: lower poverty, guaranteeing "at least some income" for the elderly, ensuring "a modest income in retirement." These are the exact goals that Tyler also wants to accomplish, but he wants to do it without social security taking over the world.