School has been busy lately and the economics news has been in rolling forward. There are a number of interesting pieces out there that could be really useful for teaching. For example, in today's New York Times, Robert Shiller has a column on the larger effect of unemployment on the employed called "Survival of the Safest", which has a lot of good insights about unemployment. One, that has real applications to teaching macroeconomics is an explanation of sticky wages (even though he does not use that term) in a recession.
The New York Times also has a great graphic showing the the TARP repayment. It shows that while some parts of the program have profited, most parts of the program have not (should that really be a surprise?). Gretchen Morganson follows that up with a column about why we should expect more TARP like programs in the future because the Dodd-Frank financial legislation set up more backstops for the financial industry and created more moral hazard opportunities by enlarging the potential firms that could be considered "too big to fail".
Paul Krugman has a good insight about how people view markets as morality good, and how that view is utterly wrong in this blog post called "Economics is not a Morality Play". This is an important point students need to understand. Economists do not like markets because markets are virtuous - any they are not. Economists like markets, when they work well, because they work to efficiently distribute resources to best meet needs. When markets do not work, economist think about how to use other tools to efficiently distribute resources to meet needs. That might mean changing markets with regulation or outright government action to deal with "market failure" through the provision of public goods.
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