The Table above is extracted from Table VI.F9 in the 2013 Annual Report of Social Security. It is radically simplified because I want to make a very simple set of points, ones that have little or nothing to do with the proper policy approach to Social Security or to the adequacy of the model that […]
June’s issue of Atlantic Monthly brings to the reader a series of graphs as presented by Derek Thompson’s “How the Rich Shall Inherit the Earth”. The article gives a pictorial representation of what has taken place since the eighties in skewing income to a small, very small group of individuals numbering < than a hundred […]
When an update to Labor share of national income is released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, it does not make headlines. Yet, it gives insight. The BLS released today their revised Productivity and Costs report for 1st quarter 2014. In the 1st quarter of 2014, the non-farm Business Sector Labor share index was revised […]
by Joseph Joyce The Challenges of Achieving Financial Stability The end of the dot.com bubble in 2000 led to a debate over whether central banks should take financial stability into account when formulating policy, in addition to the usual indicators of economic stability such as inflation and unemployment. The response from many central bankers was […]
In my last post, I discussed one of the most important sets of questions regarding any proposed economic development subsidy: How much does it cost? Is that too much? The answer, assuming that we are not going to overhaul our broken subsidy system overnight, was that we see if we’re paying too much by looking […]
BLS economist Shawn Sprague writes What Can Labor Productivity Tell Us About the U.S. Economy? Labor worked the exact same number of hours in 1998 as they did in 2013 or ~194 billion hours. While there was no growth in the number of hours worked, the Non-Institutional Civilian Population grew by 40 million people, and […]
subtitled: “A Nonhysterical Look at a System That’s Working” I don’t know who Doug Pibel is but IMHO he just nailed it in this piece. I hope this meets the Fair Use Doctrine. If not be sure to share the link before we are asked to take it down.
In a WSJ interview, John Taylor, who is a professor at Stanford University, sees that the nominal interest rate from the Federal Reserve should be 1.25% now, according to his own Taylor rule. He says the financial markets are working fine. “The financial crisis is ages ago now. The financial markets seem to be working […]
Okay fine, not the best. (Click bait!) But for me, the most important — the five books that, more than any others, taught me how to think about the world. A friend in my “classics” book group asked me for nonfiction book recommendations. Here’s what I wrote: The NF books that wow me, get me […]
There is a movement taking place to understand the Fisher Effect. What is the Fisher Effect? Basically the idea is that low and stable nominal interest rates from the central banks leads to low and stable inflation. I have been writing here on Angry Bear that the Fisher Effect is made stronger when the nominal […]