Relevant and even prescient commentary on news, politics and the economy.

What are we To Do With the Phillips Curve ?

The Phillips curve plays a central role in the policy debate (this is partly due to the fact that debaters have finally learned to ignore very highly theoretical and unrealistic DSGE models).  Just to review, the Phillips curve should show a negative relationship between unemployment and actual inflation minus expected inflation (it has been defined this way since […]

Immigration and the housing market freeze are making the “last mile” of disinflation harder, not the Phillips Curve

If you look at Part 1 and Part 2 of The Demographic Outlook: 2024 to 2054 CBO projections. The estimation of Net Immigration varies anywhere from 2.7 to 3.3 million to the US in 2024. In Part 1, of CBO’s current estimates, net immigration is larger than the agency estimated last year, by 0.7 million people […]

CORRECT PREDICTIONS AND THE STATUS OF ECONOMISTS

Vis Brad Delong’s post on CORRECT PREDICTIONS AND THE STATUS OF ECONOMISTS Paul Krugman is certainly right that history has judged, and that the judgment of history is for James Tobin over Milton Friedman so completely that there is not even a smudge left where Friedman’s approach to a monetary theory of nominal income determination […]