Paul Krugman recently wrote three very interesting posts. In other breaking news the sky is blue and dog bites man. He suggests that elite perceptions of economic *events* are very much influenced by the experience of the super rich. He has been flirting with Marx for a while (Thomas Piketty seems to be a mutual […]
Noted without comment.
In a recent post, I mentioned a blog post by Nate Silver which I hadn’t managed to google. It is here Models Based on ‘Fundamentals’ Have Failed at Predicting Presidential Elections I think this is a serious effort worthy of publication in a top political science journal (not that anyone asked me). Silver attempted to […]
I grab a rare opportunity to criticize Paul Krugman. He is, again, discussing the roll out of Nate Silver’s new fivethirtyeight.com with concern bordering on dismay. Krugman’s concern is that he fears that Silver thinks that data are enough just by themselves without any theory (even the humble kind that calls itself a model). I […]
Paul Krugman recently wrote two blog posts on monetary policy in a liquidity trap. In “Timid Analysis” Krugman presents a model in which Nash favors the bold But a necessary (not sufficient) condition for this to work is that the promised inflation be high enough that it will indeed produce an economic boom if people […]
It’s always the same map. Here from Brad Delong is the map of the percentage who were slave by county in 1861 here is the corresponding area of a map of intergenerational relative income mobility by county from R Chetty 2014 (warning pdf) update: link updated thanks to Amanda. thanks
Macroeconomists generally agree that while the rational expectations assumption is very strong, it is a more useful approximation to actual expectations than the now ancient approaches of assuming adaptive expectations or the even older approach of regressing inflation on lagged inflation and using the fitted values as expected inflation. The old reduced form approaches are […]
Inflation forecasts in the Livingston survey of experts are systematically different from inflation and thus do not correspond to the hypothesis of rational expectations and a quadratic loss function. One striking feature of the forecast errors is that the averages over decades of the median over participants forecast error are dramatically different from zero and […]
Just read Bryce Covert’s excellent post criticizing welfare reform. It is too good to excerpt.
Simple national income and product accounting tells us that the current US recover (I can barely manage to type that without scare quotes and I *hate* scare quotes) has been horrible for two reasons: low government purchases of goods and services (G) and low housing investment. Consumption, fixed non residential investment, and inventory investment have […]