Andrew Oh-Willeke points us to this, on the job market for lawyers: Slightly more than half of the class of 2011 — 55 percent — found full-time, long-term jobs that require bar passage nine months after they graduated, according to employment figures released on June 18 by the American Bar Association. I couldn’t find a […]
Coming at this question from my typical perspective: a business owner facing a national economy. You start a business vermont selling high-quality furniture. You’ve developed a new chair that’s better than the other chairs on the market. (Think: the Herman Miller Aeron Chair.) Say you’re planning to sell it for $700. (You can’t sell it […]
The Fed’s credibility is obviously important. If people believe that they can and will do what they say they’re going to do — and that it will have the desired effect — they can affect the the real economy (at least short-term) by just making promises — Open Mouth Operations. (Though they must actually do […]
Or: Yes, The Rich Really Are Different You’ve all probably seen the depressing reports from the newly issued 2010 edition of the Fed’s triennial Survey of Consumer Finance, in particular the 39% drop in median household net worth, ’07-’10. Here’s a picture (click for larger): The well-off have done fine. In the greatest economic downturn […]
Noahpinion points us to — and goggles in amazement at — Robert Barro’s latest op-ed in the WSJ. Why This Slow Recovery Is Like No Recovery This prompts me to republish an open letter to Professor Barro that I posted some years ago. (To which, not surprisingly, I never received a reply.) It speaks volumes […]
Damn, Krugman beat me to this yesterday. I thought I would be bringing in a fascinating piece from the fringes of the Australioblogosphere. Bronte Capital: The Macroeconomics of Chinese kleptocracy. My basic take is the same as Paul’s: I have no idea whether this John Hempton piece on China is at all right, but it’s […]
Today (emphasis mine): Vast majorities of Americans don’t trust their institutions. That’s not mostly because our institutions perform much worse than they did in 1925 and 1955, when they were widely trusted. It’s mostly because more people are cynical and like to pretend that they are better than everything else around them. Vanity has more […]
I’m not nearly the first to this party, but want to bring it up for my readers who may not be clued in to it. For the second year in a row, some of the best economics bloggers on the Web (this year: Matt Yglesias, Mike Konczal, Karl Smith, Lisa Donner), did a session at […]
The frequently brilliant Ashwin Parameswaran makes The Case Against Monetary Stimulus Via Asset Purchases, and Nick Rowe responds. Ashwin replies, analyzing “monetary policy as a threat strategy.” Nick’s view (in Ashwin’s words): …a credible threat will cause market expectations to adjust and negate the need for any actual intervention in markets by the central bank. […]
John Sides at The Monkey Cage makes what seems to be an incredibly important point, at least for politico types. In the latest Pew report (PDF) that everyone’s nattering about, we see a big rise in “independent” voters over the last decade (to 38%). But: only 12% of respondents did not identify with or lean […]