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Category Archive for 'Macroeconomics'

I am sure many bytes are being “spilled” to analyze and comment on Krugman’s latest outburst or peacocking or whatever you wish to call it. Read the comments. Remember that all of those folks think you should get into the community hot-tub with them. A few points: Remember what I said about Woody Going Straight […]

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I enjoyed this Krugman piece. He’s worried about the long-term unemployed. I am too. A few things. (1) There are some trends to longer term dissociation from the labor market that have nothing to do with this crisis or the weak policy response to it. Would Dr. Krugman agree that we can and should do […]

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A popular canard of the “progressive” line of thinking is that interest rates are a tool of exploitation – yet another in the long line of misunderstood stories of oppressors versus oppressed. To suggest that interest is unique to capitalism or comes from capitalism is in itself a laughable claim, particularly since nothing like capitalism […]

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From tomorrow’s paper: The hunger for yield is driving investors to snap up securities backed by student loans, even as borrowers are falling behind on their payments at a faster clip. Sadly, I cannot figure out who these investors are. I don’t understand how we can publish a story on this and not discuss who […]

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We’re only talking about a small portion of ObamaCare, right? The result is that, while only about 135,000 people have gotten coverage at some point, they are proving far more costly to insure than predicted. Read the rest. In other news, I came across this piece this morning on the decline of the family (I don’t […]

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In Laura Hildebrand’s Unbroken, in Chapter One she mentions some of the things state governments were involved in around the Depression. In one piece she mentions that state governments were heavily involved in mass sterilization and outright execution of “undesirables.” And here is Tyler Cowen linking to Nate Silver in the New York Times, in the “we’re […]

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I think we can save the planet with the stroke of a pen. Think about what “E”nvironmentalists want us to do. They want us to scale back our consumption in order to save the earth. Fine (we have a post coming up on Monday to explore this idea further). But remember when we say “we […]

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Economists have long puzzled about why even some currently unemployed workers could not simply reduce their wage requirements by a substantial amount and encourage firms to hire them. There is a nice literature on this which includes explanations such as unmeasured productivity, the signaling implied by such an offer, the matching difficulty between potential workers […]

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Some of you may be familiar with the idea in macroeconomics that since prices (particularly wages) are “sticky” that recessions can turn into depressions or last a long time because the inability of prices and wages to fall when “aggregate demand” falls will prevent markets from equilibrating. There is lots to read on this topic, […]

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I told my students that Romney looked pretty foolish for going too hard on Obama’s economic record on the recovery data alone, given that I was very persuaded by Reinhardt and Rogoff’s excellent book (it’s an empirical study of 800 years of business downturns and they find that recoveries after financial crises seem to be […]

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