The 2.5 million employment gain does not look too impressive from this perspective.

I highly recommend David Hopkins blog.  Yesterday, he posted a piece on the end of confident conservatism.  It begins like this: After Richard Nixon’s 1968 election, many conservatives came to believe that their movement naturally represented the political views of most Americans. This conservative faith in the wisdom of the average citizen was cemented by […]

The barriers facing black people in America today are numerous and daunting:  poor schools, dangerous neighborhoods, lack of income, wealth, and connections, persistent formal and informal discrimination in so many settings.  The list goes on, and it certainly includes many problems with our criminal justice system, from over-criminalization to degrading conditions of imprisonment to oppressive […]

The HEROES act passed by House Democrats did not include a formula that would keep expanded unemployment insurance benefits in place until the economy has recovered.  The always thoughtful Ezra Klein is very critical of this omission.  His argument can be boiled down to two points: If Biden wins the presidency, Republicans will predictably try […]

by New Deal democrat Housing permits and starts plummet in April, but mortgage applications suggest big rebound in May At some point it is going to be safe for the economy to be completely reopened. When that point comes it would be nice if the leading sectors of the economy have already been priming the […]

by Ken Melvin Economy’s Role Economy: An Economy is a social entity’s aggregate activity of producing and exchanging goods and services. To date, a large body of knowledge about how economies work has been accumulated; a body of knowledge known as the science of economics. In a Well Functioning Economy, the requisite goods and services are […]

A very interesting paper (not peer-reviewed) by a team of Israeli scholars proposes that a more manageable exit from pandemic lockdown might be achieved by implementing a scheme in which employees go in to work for four days and then return to isolation for ten days before repeating the cycle. A variation on the proposal […]

What happens when you downsize a large number of people? Well, it depends on the cohort downsized. In this case, Figure 1 That’s correct; Average Hourly Earnings skyrocketed from $28.67 to $30.01: up $1.34. For context, that one-month change matches the average hourly earnings growth from September/October of 2018 until March of this year–18 months […]

On April 20th Georgia Governor Kemp called for “reopening more of the state’s economy to minimize the ‘terrible impact of Covid-19 on public health and the pocketbook.’” It would apply to certain non-essential businesses. Kemp, who was later told by Trump it was too early to reopen Georgia’s economy, was following Trump’s lead to begin […]

Arnold Kling writes (my bold): Yesterday’s post on lockdown socialism was unusual for me, in that it was not aimed at persuading someone who might disagree. Let me approach the topic by trying to make the best case for the other side. If I were a lockdown socialist, I would argue as follows. We want […]