This is important. Amazingly, socialist Sweden attempted radical partial privatization of its schools with about one fourth of students now attending publicly financed privately managed schools (roughly charter schools). This daring reform was followed by a dramatic decline in scores on the PISA international standardized test including the largest decline in math scores of all […]

California Pays off $14 Billion in Costly Debt From 2004 Promoting the borrowing in Proposition 57 was one of Schwarzenegger’s first acts in office, and he pitched the measure as a way to avoid public service cuts and tax increases. The state had the lowest credit rating among all 50 states in the nation at […]

I will try again to answer Larry Summers’s question “”What wouldn’t be a Dynamic-Stochastic General-Equilibrium model?” I won’t present a formal macroeconomic model in a blog but will try to describe what I might do if I got down to work. I think the first step back to not DSGE starts with the simplest standard […]

In Which I Try to Answer a Question asked by Larry Summers as a Joke The LSE held a discussion on Reconstructing Macroeconomics. Brad DeLong posted a transcript , the video is here. Larry Summers opened with a joke Larry Summers: You know I was tempted to blast off at Dynamic-Stochastic General-Equilibrium models. That is, […]

People who follow British Association Football (Soccer, Football, Footie) know that it consists of a number of tiered Leagues which have annual processes of relegation and promotion as the bottom performing teams move down a tier while the top performing ones in the lower tier move up. Play online and have the chance to win […]

I want to stress the need to shop around when looking for healthcare insurance on the exchanges by citing one example of how it can make a difference. As mentioned earlier here and on Charles Gaba’s ACA Signups blog, Shopping Around does make a difference. If you did not do so, you could be suckered […]

by Joseph Joyce The Challenges of the Greek Crisis The Greek crisis has abated, but not ended. Representatives of the “troika” of the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund returned to Athens for talks with the Greek government about a new bailout. This pause allows an accounting of the many […]

This is an excellent interview of former Fed analyst Danielle Dimartino Booth ( Dallas Fed) by Erin Ade at Boom Bust. I fully agree with her analyst analysis. Listen closely to her analysis of the housing market. She points to one area where low interest rate policy backfired.