Mainly an open thread and effort to see if I can still post using blogger. But I have very strongly the impression that countries which default on their debts do relatively well after the default.  Default is associated with horrible economic performance, but I think this is because default is caused by horrible economic performance. […]

The migration process to wordpress from blogger is to start about 11:30 PM March 21. Hopefully there will be few glitches. Our new design has some features to be added after the migration and can be explained then. Soon we will welcome readers to our new look, and allow readers to explore posts in a […]

Update April 4: Steve Waldman kindly links to this post, and I’m rather abashed that he does because it’s wrong as written. As pointed out by Ramanan. (Though the spirit is right.) I should have said: Private Domestic Nonfinancial (i.e. households and businesses, a.k.a. the “real” economy in which people produce, sell, and buy goods […]

by Linda Beale(op-ed) The Evils of Corporatism I have often written in these pages about “corporatism”, an approach that pervades our economy and many government agencies and does not align with the interests of the majority of Americans. Corporatism runs rampant today in states’ treatment of their public universities, treasures of the American educational system […]

Via Bloomberg comes this note on demographics and the work force, and continues a conversation about how that impacts all of us. Probably not in the way most often provided in punditry…such as taking jobs away from the millenium generation, wealthy old geezers stereotypes, or alarms sounded about who is to pay for services we […]

Dean Baker writes Worms, Pond Scum and Economists The effort to blame the awful plight of the young on Social Security and Medicare is picking up steam.In the last week, there were several pieces in The Washington Post and The New York Times that either implicitly or explicitly blamed older workers and retirees for the […]

Bloomberg’s Josh Barro is the lead writer for the Ticker, Bloomberg View’s blog on economics, finance and politics. Social Security is the healthiest component of the U.S.’s retirement saving system Last week I wrote that Social Security is the healthiest component of the U.S.’s retirement saving system and should therefore be expanded. This isn’t a […]

Reader Matthew McOsker writes: What Bush II and Clinton Got Wrong On The Economy First, we start off with sectorial balances. Trade deficits must be offset by government and/or private deficits. For example, if we had a $50 billion trade deficit, then that needs to be offset with a $50 billion government deficit. Otherwise, the […]

Okay, by now y’all know that I’m not an economist.  Nor a statistician.  Nor a mathematician. Nor even someone who can easily understand simple line graphs.  (Bar graphs work for me, though, I’ve discovered!) But I do know a tad about 20th century American history.  So when I read Paul Krugman’s latest blog post, titled […]

I have screamed for the last several years that the problem with economics isn’t that Macro is problematic; DSGE is a detour but—as Noah Smith shows here—it can be used as an access road. The problem is assuming that “micromotives” must be universal.  For all of the emphasis about the glories of using natural logs […]