Duncan Foley On Socialist Alternatives to Capitalism Yes, it is May Day, time to think about workers and socialism, while Vladimir Putin gets himself inaugurated for another term as President of Russia, with military vehicles parading In Red Square like they used to for the glory of the workers, but today for the glory of […]
March 2018 personal income and spending Programming note: I’ve been working on a mega-post about housing, that is now complete except for a few graphs. So, please excuse the brevity otherwise. March 2018 real personal income and spending were both positive. So far, so good. The personal saving rate fell slightly: Again, this is consistent […]
There has been a bit of commotion recently about the Job Guarantee idea (AKA employer of last resort). I don’t consider myself an opponent of the strategy but I do have several reservations about its political feasibility, the marketing rhetoric of its advocates, and its economic and administrative transparency. Some of these concerns I share […]
Higher wage growth for job switchers: more evidence of a taboo against raising wages? Yesterday the Atlanta Fed published a note touting the wage growth for those who quit their jobs and transfer to a different line of work, writing that: Although wages haven’t been rising faster for the median individual, they have been for those […]
I’m teaching “Economics for Non-Economists” this semester. This is an interesting experiment, and is strongly testing my belief that you can teach economics without mathematics so long as people understand graphs and tables. (It appears that people primarily learn how to read graphs and tables in mathematics-related courses. Did everyone except me know this?) Since […]
Can Nudging Become A New Road To Serfdom? Last weekend I attended a conference at NYU Law School on “Behavioral Economics and the New Paternalism, organized by Austrian economist Mario Rizzo and classical liberal law professor Richard Epstein. It included economists, lawyers, philosophers, and a couple of psychologists. While there was a range of views […]
by Cactusman What Happened to the Political Price for Lying? (Part one of two) James Comey’s recent interview on ABC has resurrected questions about the importance of honesty in public officials. One of the key themes of Comey’s interview, and apparently his soon-to-be-released book, is that Donald Trump is “morally unfit” to be president because, […]
Is the US economy booming? April 2018 update Back in January, I asked if the economy was “booming.” There’s no official definition, but based on my recollection of the two periods I have lived through that felt like booms, the1960s and late 1990s, the two times in my life that the feel of an economic […]
A thought for Sunday: The Abyss always looks back, Presidential polling edition A point I have made about economic forecasting a number of times is that one can be an excellent forecaster, so long as one is a bug on the wall. Once a significant number of people begin to follow *and act upon* the […]
A Teachable Moment: The Importance of Meta-Learning Today’s New York Times has a fine article by Manil Suri about math education and the development of reasoning skills. Its concluding point is that, while the general contribution of the first to the second is weaker than you might think, math instruction can be improved by bringing the math-reasoning […]