rdan(response to cactus, lifted from comments, by juan. Slightly edited for readability)) ‘Favoritism’ seems too kind while also continuing to assume legal-political institutions [‘the state’] to be dominant rather than dominated, which is then to avoid the question of which class or class segment dominates through the mediation of ‘the state’. Willem Buiter put it […]
rdan Consider the Evidence and Crooked Timber April 16-18, 2009 post a series by Lane Kenworthy on income inequality. Our own Robert Waldmann has thoughts of his own as well. How to pay for inequality reduction: follow-upApril 20, 2009 One way to make some progress in reducing income inequality is to significantly increase redistributive transfers […]
rdan(hat tip ronin 8317…A very good paper by John Geanakoplos on the leverage cycle..) John Geanakoplos on the leverage cycle At least since the time of Irving Fisher, economists, as well as the general public, have regarded the interest rate as themost important variable in the economy. But in times of crisis, collateral rates (equivalently […]
by cactus Forbes and the “Self-Made” Label I’m kinda busy these days, but this topic is small pet peeve of mine: what the heck is up with Forbes and the “self-made” label? On occasion, I’ve gone through the Forbes 400 list of richest Americans and marveled at who Forbes manages to decide qualifies as self-made. […]
Robert Waldmann Steve Benen made a graph out of a table from a column by Bruce Bartlett. Bruce Bartlett is an interesting figure — a heterodox conservative who praises Reagan and criticizes Bush Jr. The figure sure fits Bartlett’s line. It shows the effective tax rate on families with median income. Sad to say, Steve […]
I’m not really paying attention to (major league) baseball this year, so I should probably leave this to Scott, but, as a query: For all team that was supposed to have had a major improvement in its middle relief this year, the Yankees appear to have given up a large number (>=7) of runs in […]
So the brilliant NFL has “solved” the Yom Kippur problem, moving the starting time for the Jets-Titans game to 1:00p.m. Which means that, with luck, the game ends around 4:00—probably closer to 4:15.* It appears that sundown on 27 September 2009—from which time one is expected to fast for 24 hours, so any eating better […]
by cactus The Bail-Out as Class Warfare The argument for bailing out AIG essentially amounted to this: Goldman, Welfare, Queen & Sachs the counterparties need to be helped. I don’t have much sympathy for this argument. See, about a decade ago, my sister had a small business exporting cosmetics from the US to South America. […]
by Bruce Webb In the course of a post called the The Vanishing Surplus-Revealed there arose a semantic dispute about what ‘surplus’ means. Well I maintain that the answer to that question is not in authorial intent but instead on audience reception. If you are writing for a popular audience you have an obligation to […]