Guns and Commas I am glad that the large pro-gun rights rally in Richmond on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day ended without any violence as had been threatened by some people around the US. That is nice, but it does not end the unpleasant situation legal situation that has arisen here in Virginia. As of […]
(Dan here,,,at lunch the other day a friend asked about the great prices for stocks. This post by Thomas Palley caught my attention as a well written post on the nuances between stocks and finance and the 80% who do not own many stocks and the economy of losers and winners. ) by Thomas […]
Bloomberg’s Plan for Addressing Economic Inequality: not a wealth tax A bit ago (Jan 8, 2020), the New York Times described Michael Bloomberg’s plan1 for addressing the income and wealth inequality in the United States that has been a constant topic of discussion by Democratic candidates. Briefly, as with the robber barons of Teddy Roosevelt’s […]
The Democratic Debate in Des Moines: progressive candidates on means testing versus universality Dana Chasin at 2020 Vision does a good job of encapsulating key issuesthat surface in the Democratic debates. Let’s get this out first: most listeners will admit that the debates seem both too long and too short, as mentioned on Stephen Henderson’s […]
Tyler Cowen today flags a paper by Currie, Kleven, and Zwiers on changing practices in economics, and highlights the following: Panel A illustrates a virtually linear rise in the fraction of papers, in both the NBER and top-five series, which make explicit reference to identification. This fraction has risen from around 4 percent to 50 […]
For MLK Day: unemployment by race In observance of Martin Luther King’s birthday, almost all US markets are closed and there is no economic data. So on this day let’s see the extent to which economic opportunity in several neutral metrics has improved since the passage of the Civil Rights Acts in the 1960s. Here […]
NPR’s Planet Money went to the 2020 American Economic Association conference in San Diego where they asked economists, “what is the most useful idea in economics?” David Autor appears near the end of the episode (minute 16:00) to talk about the lump-of-labor fallacy. Almost exactly 87 years earlier, on January 18, 1933, Arthur Dahlberg appeared […]
Dan Shaviro (NYU) and Tim Smeeding (WISC) on NPR’s Detroit Today Show For those of you who may not have the opportunity to tune into Stephen Henderson’s radio program Detroit Today on NPR, it might be useful to have a short summary of the January 9 discussion of the “wealth gap” from that program. Background Tax lawyers […]
Small Town Support for Trump and “The Working Class” Much has been written about voters, sometimes labeled the “white working class”, who live in small towns, have low incomes and supported Trump in 2016. There are various hypotheses—not, despite the rhetoric, mutually exclusive—that have been proposed to explain this: never-ending latent racism galvanized by the […]
The chart of the decade Today doesn’t just mark the end of 2019, but the end of the 2010’s as well. So it’s only suitable that I post the one chart that I think most explains the economy over the past 10 years. In terms of public policy, that chart would be of the continual […]