A couple of nuggets of good economic news Sometimes there is almost no economic news at all. This isn’t one of those times. Because there have been increasingly ominous signs among the long leading indicators, that have been spilling over into the short leading indicators, suddenly there are a lot of signs and portents to […]
No More Fed Rate Hikes in 2019… The fundamentals are “sound”?: PICTURE = 1000 WORDS
by New Deal democrat The widened Panama Canal is disrupting internal US transportation patterns The newly-widened Panama Canal opened to traffic in late 2016. Since then, there have been several ongoing disruptions in how goods are transported from suppliers in Asia to their ultimate markets in the US, including affects on seaports, trucking, and rail. […]
Introductory Econ Textbooks: A Different Take on the Issues My eyes were drawn to Timothy Taylor’s gloss on Greg Mankiw’s ruminations on the life of an econ textbook author. As such an animal myself (Microeconomics and Macroeconomics: A Fresh Start), I’ve thought about many of the same questions. Differently. Issue #1: How do you teach the introductory economics courses […]
The fundamentals are “sound”?: PICTURE = 1000 WORDS
Dylan Matthews has a typically excellent explainer about taxing the rich. Just click the link. I have one thought. Matthews is soft on capital income. Matthews wrote Saez and Diamond also argued that capital income — income from things like capital gains, corporate profits, dividends, etc. — should be taxed, which broke with previous models […]
A Small Anecdote about Alan Krueger It was back at the beginning of the 1990s, and I was putting together a panel on NAFTA for the ASSA meetings. This would be URPE’s big plenary at the event, and, among others, I was able to enlist Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, a leader of uncommon integrity and seriousness of […]
The government shutdown may have caused a mini-recession Aside from being a monumentally poor policy outcome, and aside from the hardship it caused nearly a million workers, the government shutdown may also have caused a general contraction in production, sales, and income, and a slowdown in employment, that if it were longer would qualify as […]
Now that Andrew Yang has made it into the first debate by meeting the fundraising threshold, and being on Morning Joe this morning, it is time to post this interview of him via Freakonomics. I was impressed by his thought approach. He is the first person who is talking about the economy as a ecosystem […]
Preventing Presidential autocracy: thoughts on reining in Executive power Matt Yglesias posted a jarring tweet this past week when he wrote: He elaborated by linking to a long-form article he wrote four years ago, explaining his position, where in relevant part, he wrote: America’s constitutional democracy is going to collapse. Some day … there is going to be a […]