No More Fed Rate Hikes in 2019… The fundamentals are “sound”?: PICTURE = 1000 WORDS

by New Deal democrat The widened Panama Canal is disrupting internal US transportation patterns The newly-widened Panama Canal opened to traffic in late 2016. Since then, there have been several ongoing disruptions in how goods are transported from suppliers in Asia to their ultimate markets in the US, including affects on seaports, trucking, and rail. […]

Introductory Econ Textbooks: A Different Take on the Issues My eyes were drawn to Timothy Taylor’s gloss on Greg Mankiw’s ruminations on the life of an econ textbook author.  As such an animal myself (Microeconomics and Macroeconomics: A Fresh Start), I’ve thought about many of the same questions.  Differently. Issue #1: How do you teach the introductory economics courses […]

The fundamentals are “sound”?: PICTURE = 1000 WORDS

Dylan Matthews has a typically excellent explainer about taxing the rich. Just click the link. I have one thought. Matthews is soft on capital income. Matthews wrote Saez and Diamond also argued that capital income — income from things like capital gains, corporate profits, dividends, etc. — should be taxed, which broke with previous models […]

A Small Anecdote about Alan Krueger It was back at the beginning of the 1990s, and I was putting together a panel on NAFTA for the ASSA meetings.  This would be URPE’s big plenary at the event, and, among others, I was able to enlist Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, a leader of uncommon integrity and seriousness of […]

The government shutdown may have caused a mini-recession Aside from being a monumentally poor policy outcome, and aside from the hardship it caused nearly a million workers, the government shutdown may also have caused a general contraction in production, sales, and income, and a slowdown in employment, that if it were longer would qualify as […]

As I explained in a conversation, what was done most recently by some wonderfully-over-funded people in an effort to get their children into a Tier one school certainly did not have to happen in the manner it did. They could have just approached school authorities and with a “Mellon’s” (Back to School’s – Rodney Dangerfield) […]