Cameron Harwick

Hi, I’m Cameron Harwick

I’m an economist in New York State with an interest in monetary theory,
institutional evolution, and folk music. Read More ►
  • Why Hosting the Super Bowl Might Not Be Worth It

    —External link to www.youtube.com»

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MF2NLh-I3h0 The Super Bowl isn’t just the biggest day in US sports: it’s the most-watched annual event in American television, with around 100 million Americans tuning in. The ads bring in billions of dollars in revenue, and that’s not even counting tickets and merchandise. With money like that at stake, cities make a big effort to get the Super Bowl to their field. But how much . . .

  • Summer Fashion and Inflation: A Practical Case for Targeting NGDP

    —External link to www.econlib.org»

    Most central banks around the world have a price stability mandate, and since the international monetary system regained its footing on a fiat basis after the inflations of the 1970s, that is mostly understood to mean a low inflation target. Over the past couple decades though, a growing number of economists have suggested instead an NGDP target. In George Selgin’s classic formulation, just like we . . .

  • Morality Is Fractal

    If the basic purpose of moral norms is to coordinate on the conditions under which one should cooperate in social dilemmas, this paper shows that the boundaries of such conditions must be fractal. In other words, as one focuses on the border of the area in signal space where the best response flips from cooperate to defect, the adversarial nature of a social dilemma means there must always be some possible detail, otherwise irrelevant, that can flip the best decision, and some point can always be found that will be undecidable at any fixed resolution. Thus any finite-length moral code, as an approximation to that infinitely detailed boundary, faces a tradeoff between leaving gains from cooperation on the table, and vulnerability to exploitation. Implications are discussed as to the intrinsically dynamic nature of norms and institutions, the impossibility of identifying law with morality, and runaway cultural selection.