by New deal democrat at Bondadd blog on Monday morning: A thought for Sunday: the new 3/5’s Rule and plight of the DREAMers The 3/5’s rule was one of the ugly compromises that had to be made in order to bring the slave-owning South into the Federal republic under the Constitution.  It stated: Representatives and […]

There are what I perceived as problems with the Brookings Study. Just one example: they base much of their analyses upon “lifetime earnings associated with earning a bachelor’s degree”. The average lifetimes earnings of degree holders is certainly skewed significantly upwards by the top 10% of earners (who account for over 40% of all earnings, […]

Unemployment dropped to 6.1% in June and down to 6.2% for the 2nd quarter. Unemployment is dropping faster than many economists expected. I would explain the fast drop as a reaction by firms to maintain their profit rates as labor share and productivity are both stationary now. The recent drops in unemployment are evidence that […]

From Center for Economic and Policy Development comes this framing….Global Warming and the Which Way Is Up Problem in Economic Print It is painful to read Eduardo Porter’s column on the prospects for slowing global warming and China’s greenhouse gas emissions. It’s not that Porter got anything in particular wrong; he is presenting standard projections […]

by Sandwichman at Econospeak  (reposted with permission from the author)   Supply Creates Its Own Demon II: You Don’t, Say! Karl Marx could hardly bring himself to utter the name of J. B. Say without affixing to it some contemptuous description or sarcastic remark: “Say’s earth-shaking discovery…” “…adopted by Ricardo from the tedious Say (and […]

From the NYT comes this quick look at the vaccination issues you might have heard about in the news…Vaccine Costs Soaring and Paying till it hurts… Vaccination prices have gone from single digits to sometimes triple digits in the last two decades, creating dilemmas for doctors and their patients as well as straining public health […]

Austerity by governments is a policy to reduce budget deficits by cutting spending and/or raising taxes. Basically governments withhold money from the economy. The result is that aggregate demand is reduced. Yet, there is another form of austerity where businesses lower pay to labor. In effect, businesses withhold money from the economy by reducing pay […]

Laurence Ball wrote an article called The Great Recession’s Long-term Damage. He writes about how potential output has been reduced in many countries after the recession… “Through what mechanisms do recessions reduce potential output? This question is addressed in a number of recent papers (see Ball 2014). While the results vary, it appears that recessions […]

Paul Krugman has two sentences on the money in this article on Kansas, ALEC, and failed economics: The real lesson from Kansas is the enduring power of bad ideas, as long as those ideas serve the interests of the right people. … But the effect won’t last long, because faith in tax-cut magic isn’t about […]

Here are my confused thoughts about the Burwell v. Hobby Lobby and Harris v. Quinn decisions. Unfortunately, I am Waldmann not Mann and don’t know anything about the law. I will pretend that there is some logic behind the decisions. In Burwell v. Hobby Lobby the majority found that Hobby Lobby has religious freedom — […]