It is happening as I feared. Hilary Russ writes… Private money, public projects: More U.S. states doing deals. The movement has started for private funds to own public infrastructure. This is the entrenchment of inequality, which will be very hard to reverse. So why do I fear private ownership of public infrastructure? From what I […]
Paul Krugman references a paper by NYU Stern School of Business Associate Professor Thomas Philippon that “puts it at several hundred billion dollars per year.” Three Expensive MillisecondsPaul KriugmanNew York Times Op-EdApril 13, 2014 (April 14th, 2014 Edition) …Mr. Philippon starts with the familiar observation that finance has grown much faster than the economy […]
The American Legislative Exchange Council — which authors ultra-conservative legislation and promulgates it to state legislatures nationwide — has a little index measure of states’ “competitiveness,” which supposedly results in greater prosperity for those states that rank highly. Does it? Let’s let the numbers speak for themselves: Source (PDF). Cross-posted at Asymptosis.
Reader Jan sends notice on the approval of the IPCC WGAR5 summary for policymakers pdf. (link fixed) Lifted from his e-mail, he muses: As for all IPCC reports, this one is a little thick, but can be parsed by the economically inclined. It is, on the one hand, lousy if unsurprising news. On the other […]
At the current INET conference, there was a forum presented for new ideas for teaching economics. One person who spoke was Oscar Landerretche. (begins speaking at 10:40 in video) He is the director of the School of Economics at the University of Chile in Santiago, Chile. I want to talk about his idea of […]
Yesterday, I noted that an expectations un-augmented Phillips curve fits data from the past two decades rather well. Here is an even simpler illustration of the point that lagged price inflation has not correlated with wage inflation for the past two decades. The figure is a scatter of lgwinfl — the percent annual rate of […]
100 year old Taoist master. Photo taken in 1930’s. I have written recently about how a recession could open the door to progressive policies to reduce inequality. Of course it is crazy to call for a recession. Yet the message is one of healing. So to understand this message… let’s explore a healing principle […]
Yesterday I wrote that causing a recession to correct policy mistakes would reflect the medical wisdom of re-breaking a bone in order to set it correctly. Yes, there is pain in re-breaking a bone. Yes, the patient screams. But the patient is better off in the long-run. I said people would think I was […]
A talk given by Christina Romer was very good. (Posted by Mark Thoma) She said many practical things about economic downturns. She loved to refer back to the Great Depression. The basic message was not to fear downturns, and to be careful of doing anything to prolong them. Economies will recover normally and fairly quickly […]
The search for a model to explain Secular Stagnation is happening behind the scenes at the moment. Larry Summers is presenting Secular Stagnation as an Inverse of Say’s Law… “Lack of demand over time creates lack of supply”. But getting the mathematical mechanisms of how lack of demand suppresses supply (output) seems to be missing. […]