by Steve Roth, asymptosisCross-posted at Asymptosis. Thanks to yeoman’s work by Larry Bartels, Mike Kimel, and a host of others, we’ve seen that over many decades, the American economy has performed far better, by almost any measure, under Democratic presidents. Larry Bartels’ key graph mapping income growth by quintile, 1948-2005 (from page 33 of Unequal […]

Robert Waldmann John Q. Policymaker is driving a minivan. Maynard Keynes is in the passenger seat, Ed Prescott and Robert Lucas are in the second row of seats and Eugene Fama and John Cochrane are in the back seats. John Q: We are heading for a cliff !Maynard: slam on the brakes. Prescott: I don’t […]

Robert Waldmann Isaac Newton inspired many people to try to be the Newton of various fields. Unfortunately many tried the shortcut of using the same words as Newton but changing their meanings. This meant that those words had high status, because of Newton, but nothing to do with Newton’s success in fitting facts. One such […]

Wind power actually brings electricity prices down! The Oil Drum’s Jerome a Paris writes: Bloomberg has a somewhat confusing article about the newest complaint about wind power, but the gist of it is that wind power is an issue for the industry because it brings their revenues down: After years of getting government incentives to […]

by Linda Bealecrossposted at Ataxingmatter Deficit Commmission working groups–tax group, but no practicing or academic tax lawyer One of the strange results of treatment of economists as central policymakers over the last four decades or so of the “Washington Consensus” and the dominance of Chicago School freshwater economists has been the distortion of policy making […]

by Linda Bealecrossposted at Ataxingmatter (Rdan…Linda is still in DC for briefings at Treasury so is not available at AB just now) Wall Street Lobbyists’ View of Financial System Reform [edited to add link 5/4/10 at 3:12 pm] The Washington Post has an interesting story on the bank lobby’s thinking about financial reform. Klein, Lobbyists […]

By Daniel Becker (DOLB) Following up on Robert’s post which at it’s core is discussing the article: Economic Enlightenment in Relations to College-going…. I find it interesting (not alarming at all, at least not regarding the data) that the following combination is the ultimate economically enlightened member of society if you are: very likely to […]

Robert Waldmann I don’t agree with the title of this post and one sentence, but the rest of the post is reasonable, and the data it discusses are very alarming. Todd Zywicki wrote Some of the results in this new article by Zeljka Buturovic and Dan Klein in Econ Journal Watch (a peer-reviewed journal of […]

Chris Caldwell of the Financial Times writes: This is why the leak in the Gulf may make it less likely that Mr Obama will get the environmental legislation he desires. Any bill with the slightest austerity or self-sacrifice has an uphill climb, particularly in this economy. Voters will accept the “new” environmentalism (focused on climate […]