Via Economists View (some of the comments are worth review as Deirdre McCloskey comments). Also see below Peter Dorman’s Review of Economism: Bad Economics and the Rise of Inequality by James Kwak at Econospeak. Adam M. Finkel at RegBlog: It Takes “Alternative Math” to Claim That Redistribution Is Futile: The unequal distribution of costs and benefits across […]
Caroline Pearson at Avalere has a piece on how the House of Representatives AHAC healthcare program penalizes older and lower income people more so than higher incomes and younger people. Just to refresh your memory, the ACA penalizes people who do not have insurance based upon income. While the penalties under the ACA are based […]
Via Econospeak from Sandwichman:
by Barkley Rosser (originally from Econospeak) Should The Complacent Class Be Called The Fearful Class? Tyler Cowen has published his most successful book yet, The Complacent Class, now on the Washington Post nonfiction bestseller list and getting reviewed by everybody from The Economist to the New York Times and on. It is the Book de Jour […]
Jonathan Portes asks, “What’s the role of experts in the public debate?” He assumes it is his prerogative, as an expert, to define that role: I think we have three really important functions. First, to explain our basic concepts and most important insights in plain English. Famously, Paul Samuelson, the founder of modern macroeconomics, was asked […]
by Barkley Rosser (originally from Econospeak) Trumpcare Saves Social Security By Killing People! Yes, there it is in black and white in Table 3 footnote f on p. 33 of the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) official report on the proposed American Health Care Act, aka Trumpcare. Between now and 2026 spending by the Social Security […]
by Joseph Joyce The Emerging Market Economies and the Appreciating Dollar U.S. policymakers are changing gears. First, the Federal Reserve has signaled its intent to raise its policy rate several times this year. Second, some Congressional policymakers are working on a border tax plan that would adversely impact imports. Third, the White House has announced […]
Trump’s America First economic strategy looks a lot like the import substitution economic development strategy that was so popular several decades ago—notably in Latin America and South Asia.. But it only had limited success, especially compared to the export led growth strategy followed in East Asia. Import substitution tended to produce fragmented, inefficient and low […]
by New Deal democrat Larry Summers: genius economist, failure at Psychology 101 One of my recurring themes is how macroeconomic theory, no matter how elegant mathematically, consistently errs because it fails to take into account basic psychology — i.e., how the human animal actually works. A big component of this failure is that humans, like […]
From the Roosevelt Institute comes this graphic on the overall reality of macro policies: The Republicans’ underlying assumption—that corporations invest more and create more jobs only when they are relieved of burdensome tax rates—is false. American businesses already enjoy a historically low cost of capital, and they have more than enough cash on hand to […]