EconoSpeak

 A half century ago today Martin Luther King, Jr. was shot dead in Memphis, Tennessee.  This remains one of the saddest events in our history.  This will not be a long post other than remembering this event that ended the life of this great man.  I have only two observations.  One is that in yesterday's Washington Post there was a long article about how King's family believe he was not shot by James Earl Ray and that it was ultimately a plot by J. Edgar Hoover that did him in.  I had long...

Our title is perhaps the most obnoxious line in the Hoover Five oped per some of the appropriately harsh comments to Cochrane’s post, which alas I did not cover here. Before I do so, let me turn the microphone over to Jonathan Chait: It is a foundational belief of Republican Party doctrine that tax cuts cannot have any adverse impact on the national debt. Indeed, Republicans have invented a new language in which budget deficit does not actually mean the difference between revenue and...

John Cochrane has to remind us that he co-authored a really bizarre oped: Unless Congress acts to reduce federal budget deficits, the outstanding public debt will reach $20 trillion a scant five years from now, up from its current level of $15 trillion. That amounts to almost a quarter of million dollars for a family of four, more than twice the median household wealth. This string of perpetually rising trillion-dollar-plus deficits is unprecedented in U.S. history. Oh good grief! Can one...

Today is "Good Friday" for most of established world ruling Christianity. It is indeed the recognition of the single most historically realistically accepted event of the life of this world historical individual, his death on the cross a bit under 2000 years ago. Three of the Gospels, Matthew, Mark, and John, two of which reportedly observed this as live personal observers (Matthew and John) agree on the final words of this world-historical individual. Those were according to Matthew and...

I just got around to posting this paper on SSRN, although it was written a couple of years ago.  I need to cite it for other work I’m currently doing, so it has to be out there, somewhere.  It is a more concise version of the theory than previous renditions and stays closer to the main point.What it shows:There is a simple explanation for why firms exist, why they have the boundaries they have, and why they are organized as they are, which is superior to the alternatives—and it has nothing...

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I happen to support tax simplification that does not increase regressivity of the tax system, and I recognize that there are a few parts of the Trump tax change that do that.  But mostly it massively increases regressivity, along with massively increasing the budget deficit at a time when we are not too far from full employment.  As it is, however, the new tax law turns out to be riddled with all kinds of ridiculous unintended consequences that complicate the tax code absurdly and that in...

In a TED talk, "3 myths about the future of work and why they are not true" from December 2017, Daniel Susskind channels Sandwichman: Now the third myth, what I call the superiority myth. It’s often said that those who forget about the helpful side of technological progress, those complementarities from before, are committing something known as the lump of labor fallacy. Now, the problem is the lump of labor fallacy is itself a fallacy, and I call this the lump of labor fallacy fallacy, or...

A submission to the B.C. Poverty Reduction Strategy engagement process March 23. 2018 "What makes one poor is not the lack of means. The poor person, sociologically speaking, is the individual who receives assistance because of the lack of means." – Georg Simmel “A tight labor market is important for all workers, but especially for historically disadvantaged groups." – Janelle Jones, Economic Policy Institute Executive Summary Forty percent of the 678,000 British Columbians living below...

That would be Francis M. Bator. Born in 1925 in Budapest (moving to US in 1939 with family), Francis M. Bator died at age 92 a few days ago after being hit by a human-driven car while crossing the street. The funny thing is that when I read of it, I  was surprised he was still alive, thinking he had died some time ago.It turns out that for the public he is best known as an economic and national security adviser to LBJ in the 1960s, being for awhile the Deputy National Security Adviser to...