Or: Yes, The Rich Really Are Different You’ve all probably seen the depressing reports from the newly issued 2010 edition of the Fed’s triennial Survey of Consumer Finance, in particular the 39% drop in median household net worth, ’07-’10. Here’s a picture (click for larger): The well-off have done fine. In the greatest economic downturn […]
Noahpinion points us to — and goggles in amazement at — Robert Barro’s latest op-ed in the WSJ. Why This Slow Recovery Is Like No Recovery This prompts me to republish an open letter to Professor Barro that I posted some years ago. (To which, not surprisingly, I never received a reply.) It speaks volumes […]
Damn, Krugman beat me to this yesterday. I thought I would be bringing in a fascinating piece from the fringes of the Australioblogosphere. Bronte Capital: The Macroeconomics of Chinese kleptocracy. My basic take is the same as Paul’s: I have no idea whether this John Hempton piece on China is at all right, but it’s […]
Today (emphasis mine): Vast majorities of Americans don’t trust their institutions. That’s not mostly because our institutions perform much worse than they did in 1925 and 1955, when they were widely trusted. It’s mostly because more people are cynical and like to pretend that they are better than everything else around them. Vanity has more […]
I’m not nearly the first to this party, but want to bring it up for my readers who may not be clued in to it. For the second year in a row, some of the best economics bloggers on the Web (this year: Matt Yglesias, Mike Konczal, Karl Smith, Lisa Donner), did a session at […]
The frequently brilliant Ashwin Parameswaran makes The Case Against Monetary Stimulus Via Asset Purchases, and Nick Rowe responds. Ashwin replies, analyzing “monetary policy as a threat strategy.” Nick’s view (in Ashwin’s words): …a credible threat will cause market expectations to adjust and negate the need for any actual intervention in markets by the central bank. […]
John Sides at The Monkey Cage makes what seems to be an incredibly important point, at least for politico types. In the latest Pew report (PDF) that everyone’s nattering about, we see a big rise in “independent” voters over the last decade (to 38%). But: only 12% of respondents did not identify with or lean […]
In a recent post I spoke with astonishment and admiration of an article/post by Ron Unz in the May issue of The American Conservative (he’s the publisher) that laid out a realistic, fact-based, cogent, and coherent portrait of our current economic situation. (I also pointed out that he 1. couched the post in an odd […]
Following up on some work I did a while back (Kuznets Revisited: Investment in the American Economy Since 1929), I got curious about what consumption has looked like in America over the last 80 years. I’ll give you the results first, as a proportion of output, or GDP, followed by explanation and discussion. Click for […]
In the comments on my recent Home Work, GDP, and Family Values, which discusses a recent study (PDF) on the subject, Saturos points to this Arnold Kling post replying to a Timothy Taylor post summarizing that study. Saturos thinks Arnold’s post is “excellent.” I think otherwise. Arnold says “the value of household production” is an […]