We are probably close (~500,000) to “full employment” From time to time over the past few years I have tried to estimate how far we were from “full employment,” by which I meant the average levels of the best year in each of the past two expansions. I also estimated how long it would take […]
Rudolf Meidner, one of the unsung economics heroes of the last century, argued for solidarity wages on several grounds, one of which is that low wages subsidize less efficient firms.* Bring the bottom up, he said, and you will change the mix of enterprises and boost overall productivity. It’s just a hypothesis, but here’s a bit […]
Robert J. Samuelson Denounces Economists While often on Mondays at the Washington Post, Robert J. Samuelson is spouting VSP lines about how we must be responsible and cut Social Security benefits. However, today he has written on “What economists don’t know,” which comes across as a pretty big spanking for economists, among whom he does […]
Two Recent Studies, Children of Incarcerated Parents and the Long Run Effects of Student Debt Amid the blooming flowers of May, each year sees the arrival of the Papers and Proceedings volume of the American Economic Review, containing short and sometimes punchy gleanings from the previous ASSA meetings. Here are two abstracts of interest. I haven’t […]
Over a time span of forty-four years, Kenneth Burke wrote a series of four essays beginning with “Waste — or the Future of Prosperity,” published in 1930, and concluding with “Why Satire, With a Plan for Writing One” in 1974. Between those two bookends were “Recipe for Prosperity: ‘Borrow. Buy. Waste. Want.,’” in 1956 and […]
Why I’m Not Going to Properly Review “The People’s Republic of Wal-Mart” I’ve been thinking about alternatives to capitalism for a long time now. I’ve taught several courses on the topic and plan eventually to write up what I think I’ve learned, so naturally I was intrigued by the new book, The People’s Republic of Wal-Mart: […]
Gas prices fail to ignite overall inflation in April, but real wages flat so far for 2019 The consumer price index rose +0.3% in April, just as in March mainly as a result of a big monthly increase in gas prices. This is actually a surprisingly small increase because, as I pointed out last month, […]
Are initial jobless claims showing a re-assertion of an underlying weak economic trend? I don’t normally comment on initial jobless claims, but I’m following them with particular interest at this point. Here’s why. Last spring the long leading indicators were still at least weakly positive. I saw growth ahead through Q1 of this year, and […]
The real trade deficit ( million 2012 $) increased from $81,558 in February to $ 82,054 in March. The March observation was between the January and February data points so it was not large enough to generate a significant change in imports 0.58 percentage point contribution to first quarter real GDP growth. In the […]
Econospeak (Barkley Rosser, pgl, Peter Dorman, Tom Walker) is in the financial section along with Bonddad blog (New Deal democrat) and Capital Ebbs and Flows (Joseph Joyce), and I am proud to say have a direct connection to Angry Bear (under general blogs…). Dear Dan, I wanted to let you know that your blog, Angry Bear Blog has been featured in the Top […]