Okay, once again I’m going to sacrifice my body here, risk looking stupid by asking what seems to me to be a vexatious question. Here’s the setup: When you exchange some of your money (bank deposits) for some shares of Apple stock, those shares aren’t removed from the supply of Apple shares. (Likewise your “money”; […]
Gentle Readers: Sorry to be incommunicado for so long. I’ve been working hard on a couple of projects. I built a spreadsheet for myself a few years ago to compare health-insurance plans — cost versus financial exposure/protection. I just built it out into a web app that others can use, and I’ve posted it here. […]
Simple explanations are always suspect. So do with this what you will. It’s my basic framework for thinking about how economies work. It of course doesn’t explain everything; the headline here is tongue-in-cheek. But I find it very useful in thinking about everything else. This thinking clashes quite definitively with traditional economic teachings. But it […]
Lane Kenworthy has done some of the best work on this subject. Read all his stuff. One great piece, on determinants of growth: Institutions, wealth, and inequality Only one institutional factor is strongly supported as a determinant of growth in prosperous countries, according to Lane’s really excellent statistical work: “corporatist concertation.” Corporatist concertation is not […]
Larry Summers’ recent speech (and Paul Krugman’s paean to it) have brought the issue of secular, decades-long stagnation to the front of the econoblogosphere agenda. Tyler Cowen, of course, made it prominent some time ago. But he posited a tech cause: we’ve picked the low-hanging innovation fruit. Summers, Krugman, et. al. suggest that policies and […]
For the moment, let’s go with old saw that “economics is the study of scarcity.” (Though I disagree with it; the proper study of economics is human reaction functions.) What’s scarce these days? Certainly not supply. In an 80%-service economy suffering high unemployment and a unprecedentedly low labor/population ratio, higher demand for massages is not […]
I couldn’t resist following up on yesterday’s post with another polling outfit. Quinnipiac just came out with fresh numbers. Here’s net approval over the last five months: Currently: Negative 57% for the Pubs, compared to the Dems’ (still less than impressive) -28. Here’s the breakout: Highlight number: As of October 1, 74% of Americans disapprove of […]
Give the Republicans enough rope and they’ll hang themselves? It seems to be working. Yeah, it looks like Dems have taken a hit from this whole business, as Republicans hoped they would. But like the debate in general, it’s very much not symmetrical. Combine this with the Pubs’ internal discord: are they reaching the point that […]
Tim Kane was nice enough to include my question in this year’s Hudson Survey of Leading Economics Bloggers (PDF). Here’s the question and the results: Judging based on post-war economic data, how do prosperous, high-GDP/capita countries compare with one another? Countries with larger government sectors have _____ growth rates compared to countries with smaller government sectors. As a group, […]
There’s great discussion out there on this topic, see Steve Randy Waldman’s links list here. Karl Smith gives us this graph and asks: I mean, honestly, would you look at the graph above and conclude that during the 1970s the economy dangerously overheated. I’d like to offer a perhaps more useful (though more complicated) look. […]