The Wall St. Journal quoted Peter Thiel’s business plans. It is mostly behind a paywall. Competition is for Losers If you want to create and canpture lasting value, look to build a monopoly, writes Peter Thiel By Peter Thiel Sept. 12, 2014 11:25 a.m. ET What valuable company is nobody building? […]
All Economists Are Bastards — Except Us Peter Frase has a very interesting post up about the role of popular culture in legitimizing the police. Frase recounted a forum he attended with Alex Vitale talking about his book, The End of Policing. In response to a question about why people believe that the function of policing is […]
Fiscal Stability or Dire Straights: John Cochrane’s Latest Rant At times John Cochrane babbles on incoherently on what should be a straight forward issue. This post is one example: Once you net out interest costs, it is interesting how sober US fiscal policy actually has been over the years. In economic good times, we run primary surpluses. […]
Why I’m worried about the decline in real wages This is a follow-up to my post yesterday concerning the decline in real average and aggregate wages. Why should the data from just one month cause me to warn that “This is Bad?” To show you, let’s decompose the data into CPI and nominal aggregate wages, […]
This is bad: real wages *declined* in January; may be rolling over Consumer prices rose +0.5% in January. That in itself isn’t bad news, as they rose an equal +0.5% one year ago, so the YoY inflation rate remains at +2.1% (so if 2% really is a target rather than a ceiling, it should not […]
Rumble on Wall St. — No Other Way of Keeping Profits Up! At Jacobin, Seth Ackerman did an interview with J.W. Mason about The Class Struggle on Wall Street that considers the trade-off between relative profit and wage shares of income. Whether you agree with his analysis or not, Josh teases out some of the implications of the […]
Baumol Cost Disease and Relative Prices – Part 2 Many thanks to the Angrybear for reposting this as well as some excellent comments (save that absurd contention I’m a Luddite). If you check the comments over at Mark Perry’s place you will see that Paul Wynn made the same point I made and even linked to Timothy Lee: This became known as […]
The WaPo Gang Going After The Usual Suspects On the Budget Falls On Its Face Factually All right, all right, that is not completely fair. Yes, they dump all over Trump and the GOP-run Congress for their massive tax cut directed at the rich, as well as the hypocrisy of the Republicans in so smoothly […]
Mark Perry Has Never Heard of William Baumol Otherwise why would Mark Perry write this nonsense: The chart above (thanks to Olivier Ballou) is an update of a chart we produced last year about this time, and shows the percent changes since January 1997 in the prices of selected consumer goods and services, along with the […]
Drastically Changing the Rules On Infrastructure Spending Most observers have figured out that the Trump infrastructure spending plan seems to be weirdly lopsided in an unrealistic way, with $200 billion in federal spending somehow supposed to inspire a total of $1.5 trillion in spending by state and local sources along with private ones. What has […]