Interviews with Hayek

GMU folks might enjoy this interview by Jack High of Nobel Laureate F.A. Hayek. There are several other videos in the series, which should appeal to everyone, especially if you want to know a bit more about Hayek than what was in the Hayek vs. Keynes rap video.

Some Reasonable Thoughts on the Stimulus

I normally steer clear of such topics, but Megan McArdle offers some good thoughts:

Wading through the online debates, I note that opinions on stimulus are nearly 100% correlated with the composition of that stimulus, and the opinionator's prior view of that activity. So when Democrats are in power and stimulus is mostly spending, liberals think that the stimulus is an issue of fierce moral urgency stymied by venal greed and rank idiocy, while conservatives develop deep qualms about budget deficits. When Republicans are in power, and stimulus consists mostly of tax cuts, Democrats get all vaporish about deficits and the income deficit, while Republicans suddenly realize that the normal rules don't apply in an emergency. When out of power, both sides will grudgingly concede that some small amount of highly temporary stimulus might be all right, but note (correctly) that the other side seems to be trying to make permanent as much of this "stimulus" as possible.

For me, then, this mostly ends up as a proxy war over the level of government spending, a war I'd rather fight honestly on value grounds rather than attempting to disguise my preferences with a shoddy veneer of "scientific" logic.

Consequences of Entrepreneurial Finance

From the NBER Digest:

Some of the 'softer' features of entrepreneurial financing, such as angels' mentoring and networks of business contacts, may have helped the new ventures the most.

Angel investment groups are an important and growing source of entrepreneurial finance. These groups - which are typically semi-formal networks of high-net-worth individuals - meet regularly to hear aspiring entrepreneurs pitch their business plans before deciding whether to invest in such ventures. In The Consequences of Entrepreneurial Finance: a Regression Discontinuity Analysis (NBER Working Paper No. 15831) co-authors William Kerr, Josh Lerner, and Antoinette Schoar analyze the role of these "angel" entrepreneurial financiers in the success and growth of new ventures. Their approach also exploits breakpoints in the funding process to separate the role of matching (that is, good entrepreneurs pairing with good investors) from the value provided by the angel investors.

What is the ROI from Higher Education?

Bloomberg this morning offers its analysis of this question. MIT comes out on top, with the highest net return on investment (about $1.7 million over 30 years), although it doesn't have the highest annualized rate of ROI. That honor goes to the Georgia Institute of Technology, which has an annualized net ROI of 14.2%. By comparison MIT's is 12.6%.

One story about the relative merit of attending MIT versus a public school with much lower in-state tuition is that entrance is equivalent to purchasing a lottery ticket (Brad DeLong discusses one version of this). MIT students will no doubt find an excellent job upon graduation, but some will find a job that is so excellent that they will soon be millionaires. Presumably the odds of becoming super-rich are higher from one of the elite schools than for one of the bargain schools. Of course, it could simply be that MIT is a great school and offers a superior education or perhaps that students who enroll are more motivated and thus just do better after graduation. Thoughts?

The Big Questions: Health Edition

From the World Policy Journal: "What is the most pressing health issue and how can it be solved?" The intro article offers several answers by a panel of experts (PDF). The TOC for the full issue, which is focused on issues of global health, is here. John Barry, the author of the wonderful The Great Influenza, has a free, ungated article on the next big pandemic (PDF). It is self-recommending, as they say.