(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 age, […]
Seriously, I would not fit there; but, I am smart enough to keep my mouth shut, listen, and learn. Apparently Trump is not. Trump Commenting on Elon Musk: “I was worried about him, because he’s one of our great geniuses, and we have to protect our genius,” Trump said of Musk. “You know, we have […]
Catching up: November JOLTS report Let me catch up on some data I didn’t examine last week: the November JOLTS report. It decomposes the jobs numbers into a number of metrics, but is less than 20 years old, so only covers one full business cycle, so is of limited forecasting use. To reiterate, here is […]
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 […]
Housing BOOM! 2 Housing is a very important long leading indicator, and it reflects both the consumer and producer sides of the economy. And this morning, at least in terms of starts, it hit a grand slam. Total housing starts were 1.608 million units annualized, the highest number since the end of 2006. The less […]
“Teacher of the Year‘ kneels during college football championship attended by Trump,”ABC News, January 16, 2020 During a ceremony honoring the 2019 “Teachers of the Year,” one in particular stood out. The honoree from Minnesota, Kelly Holstine, chose to kneel during the national anthem at the NCAA football championship game on Monday, where the ceremony […]