Robert’s post gets me wondering, as we enter the seventh year of the Great Recession (NBER also doesn’t treat either 1873-1897 or 1929-1945 as a single period) that there’s probably a good reason for the “changing” attitude toward food stamps. So let’s conduct an unscientific poll in comments:  in the past ten years–say, January, 2004 […]

It is naïve to think banks utilising complex trading strategies and products, across global markets, can be supervised using simple rules (even if calibrated to penal settings). Indeed, an important driver has been the necessity to address perverse incentives that are created by simple rules. – Stegan Ingves, 24 Jan 2013

Baseball lost a piece of history yesterday, as my great-aunt Edith died, about a week shy of what would have been her 101st birthday. Reference articles here, here, and here.

This coming weekend is the annual Jon Swift Memorial Blogroll Amnesty, the reasoned, proportionate response to some of the Bigger Names suddenly deciding that they needed to cull their recommendations.  Swift’s brilliant (and certainly modest) proposal was that you should instead find five blogs with lower hits than you and recommend (i.e., promote) them, not […]

Just a quick one: I was wrong; Greg Sargent and Stan Collender were correct. And, yes, I could not be happier about this, though I still expect that any real evidence of Moderate Republican Senators will show up about the same time as a flock of Ugly Chickens (link not guaranteed to work; reference discussed […]

I end up posting this, I believe, every year. And every year, despite not trying at all, I find a newer and better reason to post it. This year, it’s because cities in Virginia, including Harrisonburg City, have their students in school today—a Federal holiday—but made damned certain the kids were out on Friday for […]

Hmm, anything unusual in the world? Well, Greg Sargent tries to perpetuate the Myth of Moderate (but of course Unnamed) Republican Senators.  Stan Collender gets punked.  Nothing new on the first, but Collender’s previous piece about the realities of the Ancestral Party gives the lie to Sargent’s delusion.  Economics version: the Republican Party is at […]

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 […]

I’m not certain the authors intend this to mean that a shift to services means that workers will never get paid their MPL. But I think it does. But those at the AEA—er, ASSA—meeting can ask them tomorrow: Jan 06, 2013 8:00 am, Hyatt, Manchester E. More tomorrow. Or some day thereafter.

Dr. Black hits the latest good news from Capitol Hill: The House has signaled that it isn’t going to play ball today And I am no longer the only economist noting that the House–not for the first time–is forcing the Administration to do what it should have been ready to do all along. In fact, […]