Ryan Avent’s excellent post at The Economist finally provides me the impetus to respond to Josh Mason’s comments on my recent post. I suggested:  What we have instead of a Global Savings Glut is: 1. A Global Labor Glut: more human effort and ability available than is needed to provide goods that provide high aggregate […]

Let’s say you come across this on the interwebs: Then the person who posted it says this: I purposely did not make any argument, draw any conclusions or anything else. And the person who posted it is a prominent, high-profile right-wing economist. What conclusions do you draw about that economist? About the economic effect of […]

The Agenda Project (which is behind Patriotic Millionaires, Top Wonks, and other progressive initiatives) is preparing an open letter supporting an increase in the minimum wage. They’re looking for more signatories. SMART CAPITALISTS FOR AMERICAN PROSPERITY Dear Mr. President and Honorable Members of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives, We are writing to ask you […]

A while back I built a  model to look at the long-term economic effects of upward and downward redistribution. Posts here and here. Commenter JGF pointed out an error in the model. I’ve revised and corrected it. The spreadsheet’s here. The model is based on marginal propensities to spend out of wealth and income. Poor people […]

The misconceptions embodied in this post’s headline sow more confusion in economic discussions than any others. “Saving” and “Savings” seem like simple concepts, but they’re not. They have many different meanings, and their different usages (often implicit or unconscious) make coherent understanding and discussion impossible — even, often, in writings by those who have otherwise […]

I was having a discussion with a conservative friend recently, and challenged him to write up a budget for a decent life for a responsible, hard-working American: Living in Shoreline, a relatively inexpensive area north of Seattle. Divorced, two kids. Not very smart or capable, but has worked hard their whole adult life. He has […]

I don’t think there’s anything eye-popping or revolutionary this post, but it’s thinking that I’ve been finding useful. Long before Larry Summers bruited his recent ideas about secular stagnation and the need for bubbles, I came up against this great line from Nick Rowe (April 2011): The economy wants a Ponzi scheme. I’ve been pondering […]

I’m rather devastated to find (thanks to Tom Brown at Pragmatic Capitalism!) a discussion I missed at Winterspeak’s place from mid-December, with some of my favorite commenters going after the underconsumption argument that I’ve been going on about. It starts by citing Mark Sadowski’s comment from Interfluidity “clarifying the difference between wealth and income.” I […]

When you hear people talk about the Global Savings Glut, you can be quite sure they are talking about monetary “savings” — the global aggregate stock of money embodied in financial assets. What they don’t seem to realize is that the net holdings of global financial assets minus liabilities — claims and counterclaims — is […]

Okay well he doesn’t say it quite so succinctly. Or categorically. In fact he hedges his statement several ways from Sunday, and uses a hundred-and-twenty-three-word paragraph to do so: The near-consensus view over here at Equitable Growth and at the Equitablog is that U.S. economic growth over the past generation has been very disappointing. Too-much of our economic growth […]