The Angry Bear

Recently I learned about a proposal for Euro denominated “accountability bonds”. They are basically a clever way to enforce the stability and growth pact. I don’t like the pact, so I don’t support the proposal which I made by Clemens Fuerst here . The idea is that borrowing beyond the level allowed by the stability and growth pact could be financed only by special junior bonds. Owners of those bonds would lose everything before owners of senior bonds...

Back in 1934, the Bureau of Labor Statistics produced a fascinating and very readable book entitled History of Wages in the United States From Colonial Times to 1928 : Bulletin of the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics, No. 604. There’s lots of cool stuff there, but it quickly becomes apparent that Colonial America was a whole other country than today’s America. I want to quote extensively from the beginning of the book. (Note – I’m not going to copy...

I am aware of all internet traditions (with notably rare exceptions) and I think this might be another classic. In a generally very good article in Politico Tim Alberta wrote “Ryan is poor salesman with a great grasp of policy” [skip] “After he unveiled the bill, leading health care experts on the right like Yuval Levin and Avik Roy trashed it as a poorly conceived mess; ” So having a great grasp of policy is consistent with writing an immensely important...

by Barkley Rosser (originally published at Econospeak) Complacency Or Community Commitment? Human And Social Capital Reconsidered I have been poking at Tyler Cowen’s recent book on The Complacent Class, along with those who have praised it unstintingly, with my main complaint being that what he calls complacency may really be fear.  In an exchange posted today between Tyler and Noah Smith at Bloomberg, Noah makes many of my points, saying that what people who...

by New Deal democrat Variations on the Phillips Curve: unemployment and underemployment This is part of a longer post I wanted to write, and if FRED didn’t play so poorly with iPad I would put it all up.  But, having finished with my cursing, let me put up a truncated version now and follow up with another one sometime in the next week. This picks up on my post from several days ago in which I noted that a fuller explanation of the cycle of wage gains should...

by Peter Dorman (originally published at Econospeak) Fifty Shades of Yellow? Post-Truth Then and Now Simon Wren-Lewis can’t take it anymore. I’ve just read his fulminations on the blatant dishonesty of right wing media outlets in the US and the UK, untethered to any residual professional attachment to standards of evidence and nakedly in the service of political ideologues. He’ll get no argument from me about that. But I think his distinction between...

by New Deal democrat What’s behind stalled nonsupervisory wage growth? Wage growth for nonsupervisory workers nominally has been stuck in the +2.3% to +2.5% range (or worse) for three years.  Why? Over the weekend I was cleaning out some old graphs, and came across this one from the Atlanta Fed, suggesting that the Phillips Curve (the tradeoff between unemployment and inflation) is very much alive, with the tweak that the amount of wage growth follows a...

Via Tyler Cowen, here is a piece by David Autor, David Dorn, Gordon Hanson, Gary P. Pisano and Pian Shu. Cowen quoted the most important part, so let me follow his lead: The central finding of our regression analysis is that firms whose industries were exposed to a greater surge of Chinese import competition from 1991 to 2007 experienced a significant decline in their patent output. A one standard deviation larger increase in import penetration decreased a...

“House leaders postponed a vote Thursday on their plan to overhaul the nation’s health-care system, casting doubt on whether President Trump and House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) can deliver on one of the GOP’s central promises to the voters who placed Republicans in power. Lawmakers and White House officials continued to express confidence that the revisions to the Affordable Care Act would pass by week’s end, and talks resumed soon after leaders announced...