Mr. Krugman wrote about a possible permanent slump and declining demand. He sort of offers two possible causes of it. Slowing population growth. Persistent trade deficits He does not even mention the big drop in labor share since the crisis. Yet, we see profound economists like Michael Pettis using labor share to describe the trade […]
Paul Krugman picks up on Angry Bear Robert Waldmann’s post “Why Does Fiscal Stimulus Work? ” discussing John Cochrane’s ideas on Keynesians. So some props to John Cochrane for at least trying to catch up. Unfortunately, he’s still working from the baseline assumption that people like me (and Mike Woodford, whom he really should be reading) must […]
by Dale Coberly PERNICIOUS IGNORANCE ABOUT SOCIAL SECURITY A REPLY TO KRASTING Bruce Krasting in comments to Bruce’s post on Social Security made a number of claims that deserve a fuller answer than I was able to give in comments. Below in quotes are Krasting’s claims followed by my replies. I hope I am reasonably […]
Gentle Readers: Sorry to be incommunicado for so long. I’ve been working hard on a couple of projects. I built a spreadsheet for myself a few years ago to compare health-insurance plans — cost versus financial exposure/protection. I just built it out into a web app that others can use, and I’ve posted it here. […]
I had a friend who worked as a teacher in China. She made about $600 per month there 10 years ago. She said there was one question that the Chinese would ask her, even Chinese that she met for the first time. People would ask her name, where she was from, what her job was… […]
Simple explanations are always suspect. So do with this what you will. It’s my basic framework for thinking about how economies work. It of course doesn’t explain everything; the headline here is tongue-in-cheek. But I find it very useful in thinking about everything else. This thinking clashes quite definitively with traditional economic teachings. But it […]
Lane Kenworthy has done some of the best work on this subject. Read all his stuff. One great piece, on determinants of growth: Institutions, wealth, and inequality Only one institutional factor is strongly supported as a determinant of growth in prosperous countries, according to Lane’s really excellent statistical work: “corporatist concertation.” Corporatist concertation is not […]
When I was studying Chinese medicine, I had a teacher who had worked to develop blood banks from India to China. He said China was the only country where the people did not want to give their blood to other people. Think about that for a second. Are they being selfish? Are they seeing blood […]
Larry Summers’ recent speech (and Paul Krugman’s paean to it) have brought the issue of secular, decades-long stagnation to the front of the econoblogosphere agenda. Tyler Cowen, of course, made it prominent some time ago. But he posited a tech cause: we’ve picked the low-hanging innovation fruit. Summers, Krugman, et. al. suggest that policies and […]
Well lets try again (two hours of draft having just disappeared)/ The above figure is II.D6 from the 2011 Social Security Report. The reasons why I didn’t use the 2013 version will become clear later, short version is it doesn’t show ‘The Shape of Solvency’ while the longer version is, well, long. This figure shows […]