Greg Mankiw reviews a paper written trying to support minimum wages. Mr. Mankiw is not in favor of minimum wages and was not sold by the paper. The best paper that I know of on minimum wages was written by Bruce Kaufman. His paper was titled, Institutional Economics and the Minimum Wage: Broadening the Theoretical […]
When someone is not being noticed, there’s the saying, “What am I? Chopped liver?” There is something that Paul Krugman is simply not noticing. First, let me quote Mr. Krugman from his recent post, The Depressed Economy is all about Austerity. “I don’t want to pretend to spurious precision here. Instead, I just want to […]
Sorry for such thin postings lately but life happens. Hat tip to stormy for this reminder of a trade agreement not making the news. Use TPP in search to see other postings from Kenneth Thomas and Dan Becker: Via Truthout comes this item So far, the TPP has been drafted with an unprecedented degree of […]
I have gone a bit quiet on the QE front. Obviously, this is because I have been surprised and my pet theory has taken a beating. The theory was that QE amounts to basically nothing much. The dramatic effects on asset prices due to Abe/Kuroda announcements in Japan were seriousy damaging. But now not all […]
William Dudley is the President and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. He gave a speech about the economic outlook. The speech is standard talk about economic improvement that is not good enough yet. He states that demand is a constraint on the economy. “Turning first to consumer spending, such spending has […]
Barry Ritholz writes in his column in the Washington Post: To many people, the 2008-09 financial crisis was a complex, fast- moving news story and an anagram-laden, horrifying collapse. Such events often give rise to false histories, myths and ideologically driven narratives. It is vitally important that we understand what really happened. Let’s put to rest some […]
The Brookings Institute has just come out with a new paper seeking to explain the decline in labor’s share of national income. The paper is titled, The Decline of the U.S. Labor Share. It was written by Michael W. L. Elsby, Bart Hobijn, and Ayşegül Şahin. Here is a video of Justin Wolfers explaining the […]
Were Lawrence Summers what his critics say he is—a political hack with an inflated sense of his own skills that is matched only by his sense of entitlement, accompanied by a grotesquely non-realistic view of his accomplishments—this is precisely the letter he would write. Felix, who was The Voice of Reason on this before and […]
Nick Rowe at Worthwhile Canadian Initiative asks a question… “What happened in 2008? Why didn’t the cut in interest rates prevent Aggregate Demand from falling? Was it just that the cut in interest rates wasn’t big enough? Or is the rate of interest the wrong thing to look at? Because it’s only a relative price, […]
Via Vox come these thoughts on the interface between the language of economists and general media and audience. Deadweight Loss Re-defined Economists usually think of taxation as inefficient. This column argues that the anti-tax rhetoric evident in much lay discussion of public policy draws considerable support from the prevalent negative language of professional economic discourse. […]