Ashwin Parameswaran nails it once again. If you want to understand how the modern financial/monetary system actually works, run don’t walk to read this post. His key insight: Just as the East India Company could access cash on the back of their government bond holdings in the 18th century, any pension fund, insurer or bank […]

As a many-times business owner, I noted a couple of years back that in the ecosystem of publicly traded companies, there is nobody who thinks, acts, has incentives like, or is really anything like a real business owner. I’m pleased to find that Adam Smith agrees with me (emphasis mine): The trade of a joint […]

Richard Thaler asks exactly the right question. This from the latest IGM Forum poll of big-name economists, on the effects of taxing income from “capital.” I’ve been over this multiple times before, but it’s nice to see the thinking validated by a real economist. If you’ve got money, there is no (practicable) alternative to “investing” […]

An acquaintance of mine who’s very statistically savvy (and quite conservative) posted the following link on Facebook today. I replied as follows (I’ve replaced a link here with a clickable image): As a statistics guy, you know way better than most how important sample size is. There was a 30-year plateau in the HADCRUT data, […]

Comes to mind: the one about the two British ladies who meet at the Ascot races. “My dear,” says the first. “What a lovely hat. Where did you get it?” “Oh darling,” says the second, looking somewhat pained, “don’t you know, we have our hats.” It comes to mind as I ponder the rather grudging […]

8% are. 23% are uncertain or have no opinion. I really like this IGM panel (check out the roster — pretty damned impressive, or at least credentialed), but I wish they didn’t post such wishy-washy, softball questions. I post this one because it’s not. The one I’d really like them to ask: A modern, prosperous […]

The always-brilliant J. W. Mason’s response to what in my opinion is a quite befuddled Mike Beggs review in Jacobin of David Graeber’s Debt: The First Five Thousand Years prompts me to tackle a subject that I’ve been worrying at for a long time: Money. I’ve been worrying at it despite (or because of) endless […]

Jared Bernstein tells us yet again what the data has been telling us forever (my bold): I agree with Chye-Ching Huang, who agrees with the Congressional Research Service, Len Burman, and me: over the long, historical record of special tax treatment for investment incomes and tax cuts to the top marginal tax rates, one simply […]

…if you read about the tussle between the two great economists, you are struck by two things. First, how pragmatic a man John Maynard Keynes was. And second, how utopian the ideals of Friedrich Hayek are. This is odd, as each man attached himself to a polar opposite political philosophy: Keynes’s ideas were adopted by […]

I’ve spent a lot of time considering (here, here, here, and here) the notions of technological unemployment and the Luddite Fallacy: the idea that technologically driven productivity — machines — will replace, are replacing, human labor. I’d like to revisit that here. My basic conclusion: the Luddites were obviously wrong at the time. But they’re […]