The Angry Bear

We are probably close (~500,000) to “full employment” From time to time over the past few years I have tried to estimate how far we were from “full employment,” by which I meant the average levels of the best year in each of the past two expansions. I also estimated how long it would take to get there given the then-current monthly gains in employment. For example, two years ago I estimated that we needed to add another 2.5 million people, or 1.5% of the...

Rudolf Meidner, one of the unsung economics heroes of the last century, argued for solidarity wages on several grounds, one of which is that low wages subsidize less efficient firms.*  Bring the bottom up, he said, and you will change the mix of enterprises and boost overall productivity.  It’s just a hypothesis, but here’s a bit of recent evidence from a pair of researchers: We study the impact of the minimum wage on firm exit in the restaurant industry,...

Robert J. Samuelson Denounces Economists While often on Mondays at the Washington Post, Robert J. Samuelson is spouting VSP lines about how we must be responsible and cut Social Security benefits.  However, today he has written on “What economists don’t know,” which comes across as a pretty big spanking for economists, among whom he does not make much differentiation.  We are all pretty much as ignorant as each other and just plain not willing to admit...

Two Recent Studies, Children of Incarcerated Parents and the Long Run Effects of Student Debt Amid the blooming flowers of May, each year sees the arrival of the Papers and Proceedings volume of the American Economic Review, containing short and sometimes punchy gleanings from the previous ASSA meetings.  Here are two abstracts of interest.  I haven’t gone through the papers themselves, so I can’t vouch for their methodologies, but the results they...

Over a time span of forty-four years, Kenneth Burke wrote a series of four essays beginning with “Waste — or the Future of Prosperity,” published in 1930, and concluding with “Why Satire, With a Plan for Writing One” in 1974. Between those two bookends were “Recipe for Prosperity: ‘Borrow. Buy. Waste. Want.,'” in 1956 and “Towards Helhaven: Three Stages of a Vision,” in 1971. Burke made explicit the affinity between the four essays in each successive...

I don’t think we have entered a constitutional crisis. I think for all intents and purposes we are already past it, because of the ineffectual response to Trump’s autocratic behavior. On February 15, he brazenly abrogated Congress’s appropriations power with this diversion of funds for his “border wall.” Presidential Proclamation on Declaring a National Emergency Concerning the Southern Border. On March 15, he vetoed Congress’s downvote of that...

Why I’m Not Going to Properly Review “The People’s Republic of Wal-Mart” I’ve been thinking about alternatives to capitalism for a long time now.  I’ve taught several courses on the topic and plan eventually to write up what I think I’ve learned, so naturally I was intrigued by the new book, The People’s Republic of Wal-Mart: How the World’s Biggest Corporations Are Laying the Foundation for Socialism (PRW) by Leigh Phillips and Michal Rozworski.  I...

Gas prices fail to ignite overall inflation in April, but real wages flat so far for 2019 The consumer price index rose +0.3% in April, just as in March mainly as a result of a big monthly increase in gas prices. This is actually a surprisingly small increase because, as I pointed out last month, almost every time gas prices have increased by as much as they did — up 9% in March and 11% for April — consumer prices as a whole have gone up at least +0.4%....

There is a number of comments and commentary about the 2020 election and what if Trump refuses to leave. I put up a few and also a good article from Vox. – A comment (ken_lov) stolen from another site I frequent and read from time to time: “From time to time on other websites I’ve outlined a scenario where the Supreme Court agrees with Trump that the 2020 election was irreparably tainted by fraud and interference from abroad, and consequently issues an...