What We’re Reading: February 23, 2018

Here’s a quick round-up of some of the links shared by Mercatus Center scholars this week:

• Brian Knight warns that relying on the financial sector to serve as “de facto” regulators of other industries is “a bad idea and dangerous,” pointing to the American Banker’s “Call for Bank Crackdown on Gun Sales is Deeply Misguided.” Knight also shared “Trump Administration Looking at Bankruptcy Options for Student Debt” from the Wall Street Journal, adding that “we should also put more risk retention obligation on the schools.”
• James Broughel shared the latest Economic Report of the President. Broughel also tweeted a Reason Magazine article by Deirde McCloskey entitled “The Applied Theory of Bossing People Around.” In the article, McCloskey takes a critical look at Richard Thaler and the field of behavioral economics.
• Veronique de Rugy tweeted the Wall Street Journal’s feature on “How Jeffrey Immelt’s ‘Success Theater’ Masked the Rot at GE,” pointing to an abundance of subsidies as potentially related.
• Adam Millsap highlighted research from the St. Louis Federal Reserve that finds “it now takes 56 percent more time for GDP per capita to double in the United States than it took before the Great Recession.” Millsap adds that “slower growth makes us all poorer.”
• Tyler Cowen reviews Quinn Slobodian’s Globalists: The End of Empire and Birth of Neoliberalism. Cowen notes (as a form of praise) that he marked more than a dozen pages of the book, significantly higher than is usual for him. Cowen also recommends a new article in the Harvard Law Review entitled “Are We Running Out of Trademarks?” He says the piece is worthy of its own post, but is difficult to excerpt.