A friend of mine posted this on Facebook: I started to explain it, but realized that the standard usage is wildly screwy and confusing for any normal human, and decided to explain it here instead. The problem is that even in standard economists’ usage, “public” is used in two different ways: 1. “Public” debt: debt […]

I’d like to interject a very concrete example into the large swirl of quite theoretical, thought-experiment discussion about whether “demand for money” means “demand for the medium of exchange” or “demand for the medium of account.” Scott Sumner and Nick Rowe are, as so often, at the center of this discussion. But before I do, […]

Jim Manzi, curious as always (especially about how to evaluate government policies), tries to plumb the problem of causality. Here’s where he begins: Consider two questions: – Does A cause B? – If I take action A, will it cause outcome B? I don’t care about the first, or more precisely, I might care about […]

Matthew Yglesias points the direction in his post: the Geographically smallest Electoral College map, which starts with the densest states and works down: If Democrats can bring Indiana, Virginia, North Carolina, and Florida (or even two or three of them) firmly into the Democratic camp, the game is over for the foreseeable future. Those states […]

I’ve often commented on how childish, really adolescent, the views of libertarians are. But it’s rare that I see such a stunning example. In a recent NYT “Room for Debate,” Russell Sobel of The Citadel gives us this: Fixing disaster relief is simple: greater use of decentralized markets, and focusing government on its proper role. […]

From OpenSecrets, hat tip to John Sides at The Monkey Cage: Cross-posted at Asymptosis.

While he (uncharacteristically) doesn’t explain or deploy it terribly well, Paul Krugman points to some very excellent research on the relationship between private debt levels and the depth and duration of (especially financial-crisis-driven) recessions. The Schularick/Taylor Vox EU article is here. The Jorda/Schularick/Taylor paper is here (PDF). I think the work is excellent in large […]

The excellent Justin Fox makes the excellent point that I have made many times: that nobody in the ecosystem of publicly traded companies — including shareholders – is anything like a business owner. And no, the shareholders don’t own the corporation — they own securities that give them a not very well-defined stake in its […]

Can anybody explain this to me? AAPL AMZN Price/Earnings 15.15 302.68 That’s a 20:1 ratio. Yes, Amazon has a lower price to revenues ratio, by a 2:1 margin. AAPL AMZN Price/Sales 4.06 2.06 And presumably at some point Amazon can turn the prices-versus-market-share dial away from gaining market share/maximizing revenue and toward price and profits. […]

In June of 2008, Ron Paul made a radical proposal: the Fed should simply burn all the U.S. Treasuries it’s currently holding, reducing the government (U.S. Treasury) debt by $1.6 trillion, or about 10%. (Yes: bonds held by the Fed are counted as part of “Debt Held by the Public,” even though the government basically […]