EconoSpeak

This post follows the previous one and explains why I get so exercised about the politics of equity at a place like Evergreen State College.  The single issue at the heart of activism at Evergreen for the past two years is mandatory diversity training for faculty.  This was first proposed by the Equity Council (which was set up by the college administration and whose name changed a bit from year to year) and brought before the faculty, where it failed on a secret ballot.  Equity people were...

Who knew when I posted this: We could go back to 2002 and how the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution of 2002 was sold to people like Senator John Kerry and Senator Hillary Clinton. The Bush-Cheney White House sold this as a means to encourage Iraq to comply with certain UN resolutions and not necessarily a prelude to war. Of course the White House was lying as we knew by March 2003. Of course Bush-Cheney lied about a lot of things with respect to Iraq back then...

President Trump sent two of his minions out yesterday to lie about this question. Kudlow: We are not in a trade war. What this is is an attempt to right some of the wrongs with respect to China. Our Treasury Secretary said essentially the same thing: Our objective is still not to be in a trade war with [China] … I'm cautiously optimistic that we will be able to work this out.". We could go back to 2002 and how the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution of 2002...

The “Independent” External Review Panel on The Evergreen State College Response to the Spring 2017 Campus Events (quotes not in the original) just released its report, and it says that everything campus administration has done in connection with this episode and everything it is now doing in response to it is beyond reproach.  It repeats the arguments of the college’s “equity” faction (again my quotes—it has little to do with equity) in the faction’s own language and omits any information...

Paul Krugman relates declines in stock valuations to the insanity of trade policy from Donald Trump and taught me a new expression - stranded asset: An asset that is worth less on the market than it is on a balance sheet due to the fact that it has become obsolete in advance of complete depreciation. Paul notes: Yet there is a reason why stock prices might overshoot the overall economic costs of a trade war. For a trade war that “deglobalized” the U.S. economy would require a big...

 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...