EconoSpeak

At Jacobin, Seth Ackerman did an interview with J.W. Mason about The Class Struggle on Wall Street that considers the trade-off between relative profit and wage shares of income. Whether you agree with his analysis or not, Josh teases out some of the implications of the relationship, both for profit expectations and for political prospects.One assertion I would question is "there is absolutely no reason to expect an uptick in inflation." Well, yes, no one expects the Spanish Inquisition,...

Many thanks to the Angrybear for reposting this as well as some excellent comments (save that absurd contention I’m a Luddite). If you check the comments over at Mark Perry’s place you will see that Paul Wynn made the same point I made and even linked to Timothy Lee: This became known as Baumol’s cost disease, and Baumol realized that it had implications far beyond the arts. It implies that in a world of rapid technological progress, we should expect the cost of manufactured goods — cars,...

"There is no other way of keeping profits up, but by keeping wages down." -- David Ricardo

Most observers have figured out that the Trump infrastructure spending plan seems to be weirdly lopsided in an unrealistic way, with $200 billion in federal spending somehow supposed to inspire a total of $1.5 trillion in spending by state and local sources along with private ones.  What has not been made all that clear publicly is how this plan upends decades of established practice in fiscal relations between the federal and the state and local governments.  The long-established formula...

Otherwise why would he write this nonsense: The chart above (thanks to Olivier Ballou) is an update of a chart we produced last year about this time, and shows the percent changes since January 1997 in the prices of selected consumer goods and services, along with the increase in average hourly earnings in this version … Blue lines = prices subject to free market forces. Red lines = prices subject to regulatory capture by government. Food and drink is debatable either way. Conclusion:...

All right, all right, that is not completely fair.  Yes, they dump all over Trump and the GOP-run Congress for their massive tax cut directed at the rich, as well as the hypocrisy of the Republicans in so smoothly switching from denouncing budget deficits during the Obama era to a "what? me worry?" attitude now with deficits set to soar in a period of near full employment.  But, of course, the Monday gang at the Washington Post simply cannot avoid making a big deal about somehow...

"There's many a fly got stuck in there."Who is Charlie Kirk? He is the 24-year old executive director and founder of Turning Point USA. Jane Meyer profiled the organization in the New Yorker in December: Based outside of Chicago, Turning Point’s aim is to foment a political revolution on America’s college campuses, in part by funneling money into student government elections across the country to elect right-leaning candidates. But it is secretive about its funding and its donors, raising...

Over at Brad DeLong’s blog jonny bakho adds an interesting comment: How much stimulus did the GWBush tax cuts provide? They came during a recession followed by "jobless recovery" made somewhat better by the housing bubble, then burst big time in 2008. How different would the multiplier be if given to infrastructure repair and broadband extension, investments that create domestic jobs? In a global economy, tax cuts to the investor class are spent globally. Tax cuts for investors can...

The first premise of Adam Smith's famous metaphor about an "invisible hand" leading individuals to promote the public interest, although they intend only private gain, was that there is only so much work to go 'round. That is, Smith assumed there was a certain quantity of work to be done -- a "lump of labor." He didn't tacitly assume it -- he stated it plainly: As the number of workmen that can be kept in employment by any particular person must bear a certain proportion to his capital, so...

For the past year the US has been essentially operating on an Obama-Yellen economy, at least as far as the big macroeconomic policies have been concerned in terms of fiscal and monetary policies.  We saw basically a continuation of what had been seeing in previous years, steady growth with inflation under control.  There was some uptick in wage growth, although that had already started in the previous year.  He has supposedly engaged in a lot of deregulation, but most of it that has gotten a...