That’s the title of Cheap Talk’s Halloween costume. For the rest of today, Jeff Ely and Sandeep Baliga (two econ profs at Northwestern) are running their blog in the style of the much more popular economics blog Marginal Revolution. Easily the funniest thing is their take on Marginal Revolution’s tag line- “Small steps towards a much better world”. In the style of their joke title, Cheap Talk’s tag line is “Small steps towards much less butter in the world”. Anyway, in the style of the vast majority of Tyler Cowen’s posts on MR, Jeff Ely (or Sandeep, I can’t really tell) posted this, a list of possible economic reasons that Swedish meatballs are smaller than American meatballs. The best reasons are: elasticity of labor supply, meatball size as Hansonian signals and the lack of basic optometry coverage in the Swedish national health care system. The whole post is a very good parody of MR.
