About My Slideshows

This annex is intended as a convenient interface for access to the slide shows that are a key feature of my blog. If you have landed in the annex by accident, click here to return to the main blog.

I originally intended the slide shows mainly for classroom use. If you teach economics at any level, I invite you to cut and paste them into your live lectures, incorporate them into your on-line courses, assign them to your students as readings, or use them in any way that works for you. If you like the slides, I invite you also to consider adopting my own textbook from BVT Publishing.

For general readers of my blog, the slide shows offer a way to explore a topic in greater depth than is possible in the basic post, through added data, graphs, pictures, and background theory and concepts. I hope all readers enjoy them.

The slide shows are published under Creative Commons license Attribution--Share Alike 3.0. That means you can share, transmit, distribute, or adapt the slides for any purpose, provided you cite Ed Dolan's Econ Blog as the source, and your resulting publication is not more restrictively licensed than the original.

Sunday, February 27, 2011

What Can the US Learn from Other Countries' Health Care Systems?

Although a plurality of Americans believe that their country has the world's best health care systems, international rankings provide little support for that claim. This slideshow examines data from several international comparisons, and discusses the problems they reveal. This is the first in an occasional series; future posts will look at what can be learned from the experience of individual countries.

Keywords: Health care, international rankings

Monday, February 21, 2011

Slideshow: How Chronic Budget Optimism Helped Dig the Hole We're In

Each year's federal budget is based on assumptions about economic growth, unemployment, and other variables in the year being budgeted and those beyond. This slideshow examines the realism of the assumptions made in past budgets, and the consequences of chronic budget optimism.

Keywords: Budget, deficit, fiscal policy, economic growth, unemployment.

Sunday, February 13, 2011

Slideshow: A Policy Dilemma: Budget Deficit vs. Infrastructure Deficit

As the budget season moves into full swing, infrastructure is not only on the table, but in the center of the table. Does the US government spend too much, or too little, on infrastructure? This slideshow addresses the issue of how we can tell.

Keywords: Budget deficit, infrastructure

Saturday, February 5, 2011

Slideshow: The Case Against the Mortgage Interest Deduction

This slideshow outlines the case against the US federal tax deduction for mortgage interest expense. It concludes that the deduction encourages speculation and price instability, crowds out more productive forms of investment, and contributes substantially to the federal deficit, while providing benefits primarily to high-income households.

Keywords: Housing, tax policy, mortgage interest, imputed rent, deficit.