There has been much discussion recently of the “problem” with Macroeconomics. See Nick Rowe, Noah Smith (who may have been punked by a self-selecting sample—or may not have), Mark Thoma, Brad DeLong, RDan’s collection here a while back, and the rest of The Usual Suspects.Let’s ignore for the moment that the problem with Macro is […]

The second biggest surprise of the day, after the survival of the Affordable Care Act, is that we’ve never really gotten over our collective crush on John Roberts. How else to explain today’s outpouring of praise, not merely for the decision but for the man himself, for his statesmanship and judicial modesty? All these years, […]

I give up. It was perfectly obvious what was happening at Fukushima on Saturday afternoon, when I posted bullet points at Skippy: there was going to be a major cleanup cost and the live reactors were not salvageable, but nothing fatal to many was loose in the atmosphere yet. Which is why I followed up […]

Peter Dorman at Econospeak, who is smarter and nicer than I am,* boils down the question: [D]o you believe that managers normally make the right decisions over how to run organizations? If you believe that premise, please explain: Why all those great managers of the late 1940s through the mid-1970s ran defined benefit contribution plans, […]