While the Taiwan government--both central and domestic-- and public opinion bandwagons on the Domestic Demand Expansion Project (擴大內需方案), they should keep in mind opinions on the other side of the argument. 

Grew Mankiw has recently wrote an article on New York Times, "Is Government Spending Too Easy an Answer," reminding the Obama administration certain unsolved puzzles regarding Keynesian prescriptions. 

Economic downturns, Mr. Keynes and Mr. Samuelson taught us, occur when the aggregate demand for goods and services is insufficient. The solution, they said, was for the government to provide demand when the private sector would not. Recent calls for increased infrastructure spending fit well with this textbook theory.

But there is much to economics beyond what is taught in Econ 101. In several ways, these Keynesian prescriptions make avoiding depressions seem too easy. When debating increased spending to stimulate the economy, here are a few of the hard questions Congress should consider...

As I've been saying in the past, policy discussions in Taiwan politics tend to focus on minutiae instead of core theoretical arguments. In this case, as usual, the aforementioned counterpoint has received nearly no attention in our media.

Mankiw comments on the Democratic Candidates Debate in The Pigou Club watches the debates:

"...For the passages I put in bold, Bill Richardson and Barack Obama deserve special commendation, for opposite reasons. As a former energy secretary during the Clinton administration, Richardson has presumably studied these issues. But here he demonstrates extraordinary ignorance (or perhaps extraordinary disingenuousness) about the economic impact of cap-and-trade systems. By contrast, Obama shows extraordinary clarity and honesty about the effects of the policy he is proposing.

The economics is straightforward and uncontroversial. Both carbon taxes and cap-and-trade systems put a price on carbon, raising the cost of producing carbon-intensive products such as gasoline and electricity. In both cases, this cost will be passed on to consumers. The only question is whether the government raises revenue through a carbon tax or auction that can be used to reduce other taxes and help offset the adverse income effect.

In case you are curious, Hillary Clinton is the next speaker on this question, but she does not weigh in on the particular issue of carbon taxes vs cap-and-trade. Instead, she offers the typical vacuous blather about mandating utility companies to help make us all more energy efficient. I think of this as "magic wand" economics. Like your fairy god mother, the President can wave a magic wand and make your problems go away."

Mankiw cites NY Times columnist David Brooks in Career Advice from David Brooks:

One of the best pieces of career advice I ever got is: Interview three people every day. If you try to write about politics without interviewing policy makers, you'll wind up spewing all sorts of nonsense.

And, Mankiw on economists venturing out of their ivory tower:

I wonder how different the economics profession would be if economists were expected to do a year of service outside of academia or, at the very least, if university hiring committees rewarded a year of real-world experience as the equivalent of, say, a couple of academic publications. My conjecture is that the profession would be less creative but more useful.

Greg Mankiw's Blog: NPR looks at the Carbon Tax

Greg Mankiw gives his advice:

1. Take as many math and statistics courses as you can stomach.

2. Choose your economics courses from professors who are passionate about the field and care about teaching. Ignore the particular topics covered when choosing courses. All parts of economics can be made interesting, or deadly dull, depending on the instructor.

3. Use your summers to experience economics from different perspectives. Spend one working as a research assistant for a professor, one working in a policy job in government, and one working in the private sector.

4. Read economics for fun in your spare time. To get you started, here is a list of recommended readings.

5. Follow economics news. The best weekly is The Economist. The best daily is the Wall Street Journal.

6. If you are at a research university, attend the economic research seminars at your school about once a week. You may not understand the discussions at first, because they may seem too technical, but you will pick up more than you know, and eventually you'll be giving the seminar yourself.

In addition, he offers a fun and interesting reading list, and also outsources the task of offering Advice for Grad Students to his colleagues.

Greg Mankiw gave an interesting reading list on his blog:

A student emails me asking for a summer reading list. Here are ten very different books I like that are fun enough that you would not be embarrassed (well, not too embarrassed) reading them at the beach:

1. Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom
2. Robert Heilbroner, The Worldly Philosophers
3. Paul Krugman, Peddling Prosperity
4. Steven Landsburg, The Armchair Economist
5. P.J. O'Rourke, Eat the Rich
6. Burton Malkiel, A Random Walk Down Wall Street
7. Avinash Dixit and Barry Nalebuff, Thinking Strategically
8. Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, Freakonomics
9. John McMillan, Reinventing the Bazaar
10. William Breit and Barry T. Hirsch, Lives of the Laureates

Of the ten books listed I have only read Steven Levitt's Freakonomics. So maybe I should pick out another book and spend sometime reading it during this winter vacation.