Kevin Drum wrote “Here’s Why Bernie Sanders Doesn’t Say Much About Welfare Reform” He presents a graph of total social welfare spending in the USA divided by the number of people in households under 150% of the poverty line. He concludes “There are two obvious takeaways from this. First, overall spending on social welfare programs […]
Larry Summers has been writing about Secular Stagnation for Two Years. This is the post which triggered the trialogue It is an excellent and important post, but I will just take the non technical definition of Secular Stagnation The core idea behind secular stagnation was that the neutral real rate had for a variety of […]
Sandwichman at Econospeak has a post up on subsidizing Methane and the BLM. It fits in with the Bundy take over of the Wildlife Refuge Bldg. He credits 538 Politics for this exclusive The Armed Oregon Ranchers Who Want Free Land Are Already Getting A 93 Percent Discount We are paying for the air pollution […]
What does a public university do when a donation to it comes with strings? This is the situation Western Carolina University finds itself in today as a $2 million donation is being given to it by a Charles Koch Foundation to establish a Center for the Study of Free Enterprise under BB&T bank sponsored department […]
by Marco Fioramanti and Robert Waldmann This is the second to last post on the European Commissions DG -Ec-Fin estimates of cyclical unemployment for the purposes of calculating output gaps. This estimate is called unemployment minus the NAWRU (non accelerating wage inflation rate of unemployment). We will call unemployment – NAWRU “cyclical unemployment” even though […]
Even if his inspiration for doing so comes from (of all places) the HuffPo, This is spot-on: Unless something big and constructive in the way of global economic policy is done soon, we will have to change Stiglitz’s first name to ‘Cassandra’ — the Trojan prophet-princess who was always wise and always correct, yet cursed […]
Too wide a scope for a blog post? You betcha. But this was going to be the core of my PhD Dissertation back when I was in such a program and had delusions of adequacy. So those who wonder “WTF does any of this have to do with labor hours?” Well bear with me. Or […]
usa = Greece ? A challenge. Paul Krugman asks how a country like the USA could have a Greek style crisis. In his Mundell-Fleming Lecture Krugman defined Greek style crisis twice ” a Greek-style crisis of soaring interest rates” and ” a Greek-style scenario of higher rates and a slump in the real economy” . […]
by Joseph Joyce Can Systemic Financial Risk Be Contained? Risk aversion is a basic human characteristic, and in response to it we seek to safeguard the world live in. We mandate airbags and safety belts for automobile driving, set standards for the handling and shipment of food, build levees and dams to control floods, and […]
This is the third of a series of posts on the non accelerating wage inflation rate of unemployment (NAWRU) estimated by the European Commission. In the first, I argue that this estimate is very important because it is used to implement the Stability and Growth Pact. In the second, I argue that the NAWRU is […]