I am watchng the video of Paul Krugman on Bill Moyers. Mr. Krugman is seeing things about inequality that he hadn’t seen before Piketty’s book. So he is now seeing that inequality is a huge problem now and into the future. Inequality is the one major problem in the economy. Question… How should monetary policy […]
I haven’t beaten the drum lately for Lane Kenworthy — perhaps the best researcher out there on the economic effects of income and wealth distribution. His years of careful, diligent (and voluminous) statistical and analytic work, tapping the best data sets available, and his cogent, coherent explanations of his findings, should get a lot more attention […]
The latest numbers on 2014 taxes as share of income are out, and they’re saying pretty the same thing as last year: Above about $80K a year in income, the American tax system is not really progressive. Like, at all: The people making $100K a year pay about the same share of income at people making $10 […]
Paul Krugman has a post talking about how tighter monetary policy caused Sweden to go into deflation. Here is the chart showing their deflation. OK… we can see the deflation there far to the right. Paul Krugman talked about Sweden raising the interest rate to battle bubbles. Let’s look at the interest rate in Sweden. […]
I just watched the debate between Mark Thoma and Steve Williamson. (youtube video) As I see it, the main issue was the direction of causality in the Fisher equation. In the end, I agree with Mr. Williamson. The basic Fisher equation is… Real rate = nominal rate – expected inflation As the real rate is […]
No, I’m not talking about Piketty hitting the Times bestseller list. And it’s not just wild-eyed lefty Frenchman who are expressing concern about the state of world capital these days. Mitt Romney’s shop was beating this drum loudly more than a year ago. One of the central takeaways from Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century is […]
In case anyone is interested, I put together a lot of stuff I have been doing with inflation expectations into a soft of manuscript here (warning 19 poorly written pages) The conclusions Inflation expectations are not anchored. A simple regression model fits both the median Livingston Survey respondent’s expected CPI inflation and five year TIPS […]
David Zetland at Aguanomics mentions a very local proposition by yours truly as part of a question posed on UN world water day March 22. Purely anecdotal and personal, but I found people willing to chart water use but not to go downstairs and turn off the water as a thought experiment. It was an […]
Of course Carter’s approach to dealing with energy did not consist only with eliminating the insane regulation keeping US crude oil prices below world crude oil prices. Totally aside from (and opposite too) freeing the market, he also subsidized potential new sources of energy. As I recalled correctly, he focused particularly on “shale oil” and […]
Mike Konczal explains that Ted Cruz’s claim that the current situation is similar to the 70s is utterly insane. He wrote a brilliant article do click and read. I was sent there from a fun post by Steve Benen following angry bear Mike Kimel, stealing candy from babies and correcting Rand Paul’s arithmetic. However, he […]