Maggie Stumpp, PhD

Just tried Deep… a simple request for the local weather forecast. It placed my zip code in a location 100 miles away, gave basic seasonal climatology followed by a generic suggestion to check the NWS outlook for a detailed forecast…

One datapoint: eggs have been unobtainable in any Maui HIngrocery for the past two weeks. The few locally produced eggs are gone before making it to market.

They are not. Samuelson (who I knew) listed those criteria - which ultimately cause a good to be inadequately supplied in a competitive market. It is the latter that is key. Absent regulation, we are awash in lottery tickets. Regardless, there is a long literature on whether gov bonds are wealth

Think about it this way - public goods are largely those that aren’t adequately supplied in a competitive equilibrium (lighthouses, traffic lights…). Las Vegas, some would argue, does a profitable business in lottery tickets of various sorts.

If net proceeds from tix fund, say streetlights, the streetlight may be a public good… not the funding mechanism. Plus lottery tickets are a regressive funding mechanism… so it’s hard to argue they are a social good of any kind.

Debt is a means of financing government. It is not a “good”, rather the things it supports on the other side of the ledger may, or may not be, “public goods.” If debt finances stop lights, the lights are a public good. Including debt (the financing) double counts.

She continues to impress

Yet academic macro research still starts with Ricardian Equivalence? It’s as if the profession has never read public responses to a Krugman post. We would know so much more if economics profession would stop assuming total rationality.