Patrick Ruffini tweeted a graph showing a break in the trend of health care cost inflation with the ironic comment “The “Affordable” Care Act sure has bent the cost curve.” In the graph he posted, it is broken not bent. h/t @ChrisDeLong_ The trick is that the graph starts in 1996 & includes college tuition […]

You probably never heard of SCAAP, the State Criminal Alien Assistance Program.  But I expect it will be showing up in the news a lot pretty soon. This is what it does: The Bureau of Justice Assistance (BJA), Office of Justice Programs, U.S. Department of Justice, administers SCAAP, in conjunction with the U.S. Department of […]

Recently I discussed a paper by David Autor, David Dorn, Gordon Hanson, Gary P. Pisano and Pian Shu. The paper noted that as competition from China increased, innovation by US firms, measured by patent output, decreased. I believe the result, but started to wonder… are patents a good measure of innovation? Do patents drive economic growth? […]

It was a dark and stormy global night economy and a spectre task was haunting facing Europe… A new supply-side agenda for the left The task facing Europe is to meet the challenge of the global economy while maintaining social cohesion in the face of real and perceived uncertainty. Rising employment and expanding job opportunities are the best guarantee […]

Unlearning Economics is a person somewhere on planet earth. He or she has been debating with Simon Wren-Lewis and Nick Rowe (on twitter). Brad DeLong joined the discussion. But what about me. Elisabetta Addis (we’re married) just returned from Palermo. I was eager to talk with a physically present human being having not done so […]

Recently I learned about a proposal for Euro denominated “accountability bonds”. They are basically a clever way to enforce the stability and growth pact. I don’t like the pact, so I don’t support the proposal which I made by Clemens Fuerst here . The idea is that borrowing beyond the level allowed by the stability […]

Back in 1934, the Bureau of Labor Statistics produced a fascinating and very readable book entitled History of Wages in the United States From Colonial Times to 1928 : Bulletin of the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics, No. 604. There’s lots of cool stuff there, but it quickly becomes apparent that Colonial America was […]

I am aware of all internet traditions (with notably rare exceptions) and I think this might be another classic. In a generally very good article in Politico Tim Alberta wrote “Ryan is poor salesman with a great grasp of policy” [skip] “After he unveiled the bill, leading health care experts on the right like Yuval […]

by Barkley Rosser (originally published at Econospeak) Complacency Or Community Commitment? Human And Social Capital Reconsidered I have been poking at Tyler Cowen’s recent book on The Complacent Class, along with those who have praised it unstintingly, with my main complaint being that what he calls complacency may really be fear.  In an exchange posted […]