Net Exports goes negative in 1973 and never recovers. One word: oil. Even the USD depreciation after the Plaza Accord (the one Martin Feldstein likes to pretend was inevitably going to happen then) can’t quite get it back to being positive. And once outsourcing industry to China hits full stride… Private Investment peaks in 2006. […]
Via Barry Rithholtz, I see that Martin Feldstein has not yet finished with his Atonement. I think I’ve posted a variation of this before, but apparently I’ll have to keep screaming, at least throught Simchat Torah (and, I suspect, beyond). Anyone have Feldstein appearances or editorials from early 2004 talking about how badly the economy […]
The Swedish Lottery at Sveriges Riksbanken reminds us that it has a sense of humor, doubling down on austerity. In other news, the Chris Sims who won is not Phil’s son.
Brad DeLong has a spat with Scott Sumner: The IS-LM model led economic historians to argue money was easy in 1929-30, because rates fell sharply. It led modern Keynesians to assume that money was easy in 2008, because rates fell sharply… Well, I would say that not just “modern Keynesians” but a lot of people […]
If your question—correctly—is “why Axelrod and Plouffe were satisfied,” then you have to think like people whose vote support came, in some significant numbers, from people who were just entering the workforce in 2008 (and who did not show up in 2010 because, having entered, they found they were unwelcome). Which means, if you’re any […]
You can go read the OWS stuff yourself; I want to highlight this: Escaping on the R train from Rector Street, we got home to discover that Steve Jobs died. And that my Twitter feed is full of people wanting to wag their finger in my face for caring too much, in the wrong way. […]
When someone attempts to impede democracy actions are good things: Writer and naturalist Henry David Thoreau was once locked up for refusing to pay a poll tax. He opposed the tax on moral grounds – in a democracy, he argued, a man shouldn’t have to pay to vote…. That night, so the story goes, Thoreau […]
by Mike Kimel Via asymptosis this cartoon….
The lead article in the current AER is available here (gated, apparently, though the link isn’t working; h/t Tom Bozzo [on FB] and Brad DeLong; I was using the paper copy). The most interesting part so far: the authors only considered the documented costs of air pollution—not land, not water—in deriving the (embarrassingly negative) ROI […]
by Mike Kimel It has been a very long time since I looked at the National Review. Apparently it is still there. Jonah Goldberg (apparently also still there) had a post that begins like this: And now let us recall the “Fable of the Shoes.” In his 1973 Libertarian Manifesto, the late Murray Rothbard argued […]