Zitat des Tages von Eric Maskin:
How do we ensure in the case of public goods that they are provided at all, and that they are provided at the right level, taking into account citizens' preferences?
If budget planning requires gathering information from people who may not always have the incentive to disclose that information, then the principles of mechanism design can definitely be of use in such planning.
Because mechanism designers do not generally know which outcomes are optimal in advance, they have to proceed more indirectly than simply prescribing outcomes by fiat; in particular, the mechanisms designed must generate the information needed as they are executed.
I'm not a housing market expert, and I don't want to pretend to be one.
What we mean by an outcome will naturally depend on the context. Thus, for a government charged with delivering public goods, an outcome will consist of the quantities provided of such goods as intercity highways, national defense and security, environmental protection, and public education together with the arrangements by which they are financed.
I don't want to make public statements about issues that I have not studied in detail.
Prediction is certainly a valuable goal in science, but not the only one. Explanation is also important, and there are plenty of sciences that do a lot of explaining and not much predicting.
This may not be the most serious problem in the world, but it is a familiar one: How do you divide a piece of cake equally between two children and also make sure that each of them sees it as a fair division?
I choose questions to work on according to how much they excite me.
I entered economics because of a course I took on 'information economics,' which I found fascinating.
I like to work on a number of things simultaneously. If you're working on a variety of projects and if you get stuck on one of them, you can move to another without grinding your gears indefinitely.
Perhaps one day earthquakes, hurricanes and financial crashes will all be predictable. But we don't have to wait until then for seismology, meteorology and economics to become sciences; they already are.
I have a strong attachment to Harvard.
Through meteorology, we know essentially how hurricanes form, even though we can't say where the next storm will arise.
Specifically, in the software industry, progress is highly sequential: progress is typically made through a large number of small steps, each building on the previous ones.
A properly designed tax system can strike a balance between helping the poor and, at the same time, giving people the incentive to work.
Many markets work best with little or no outside interference. But others - especially those subject to big 'externalities' - need a helping hand.
The market is no god - it cannot solve every problem.
At Tenafly High, I was lucky to have some dedicated teachers; I'm especially indebted to my calculus instructor, Francis Piersa, who opened my eyes to the striking beauty of mathematics.
A contingent bailout policy - implicit or explicit - must be coupled with some regulation of what banks can and cannot do. For example, a ban on lending to uncreditworthy customers might well make sense.
