A note on personal income and spending Personal income and spending data from February intimates a weak Q1 GDP report, but doesn’t suggest any imminent downturn. The first graph below compares real personal spending with real retail sales: Real retail sales have pulled back from their autumn surge, and real personal spending has also declined […]
Paul Krugman is characteristically and very admirably willing to discuss in this pdf what he got wrong. In particular, he now thinks that in the 1990s he underestimated the medium costs to the USA of globalization. This is especially striking, because his debate with Bill Clinton et al on this topic was uh rather heated. […]
Why “Entitlement” Cuts and Not Tax Increases Again? John Cochrane has to remind us that he co-authored a really bizarre oped: Unless Congress acts to reduce federal budget deficits, the outstanding public debt will reach $20 trillion a scant five years from now, up from its current level of $15 trillion. That amounts to almost a quarter […]
The story of globalization from a US point of view continues. Here AB reader Denis Drew is highlighted at DeLong’s website: Paul Krugman on globalization Brad DeLong asks ‘what did PK miss?’ Comment of the Day: Dennis Drew: GLOBALIZATION: WHAT DID PAUL KRUGMAN MISS?: “I’m always the first to say that if today’s 10 dollars an hour […]
The Coordinated Activity Theory of the Firm I just got around to posting this paper on SSRN, although it was written a couple of years ago. I need to cite it for other work I’m currently doing, so it has to be out there, somewhere. It is a more concise version of the theory than previous renditions […]
LOLFF on TED In a TED talk, “3 myths about the future of work and why they are not true” from December 2017, Daniel Susskind channels Sandwichman: Now the third myth, what I call the superiority myth. It’s often said that those who forget about the helpful side of technological progress, those complementarities from before, […]
A thought for Sunday: a note of caution about opinion surveys with voluntary associations I read a Pew Research study a few days ago with a startling statistic: aside from self-identified Republicans, the single group most strongly approving of Trump was white evangelical Protestants (dark is approval, light is disapproval): This is mind-numbing, especially when […]
by Steve Roth (at Asymptosis) I just had occasion, in replying to a correspondent, to reiterate much of the thinking in my recent MMT Conference presentation. I thought it might be a useful and comprehensible form for some readers, so I’m reproducing it here. I’ve also explained this at somewhat painful length here. Correct me if I am […]
The Unsolved Riddle of Poverty Reduction A submission to the B.C. Poverty Reduction Strategy engagement process March 23. 2018 “What makes one poor is not the lack of means. The poor person, sociologically speaking, is the individual who receives assistance because of the lack of means.” – Georg Simmel “A tight labor market is important for all […]
JOLTS revisions paint brighter labor market picture Last Friday’s JOLTS report for January included some important revisions, particularly with regard to hiring. So let’s take a closer look.As a refresher, unlike the jobs report, which tabulates the net gain or loss of hiring over firing, the JOLTS report breaks the labor market down into openings, […]