EconoSpeak

Another strange twist in the convoluted lump-of-labor saga. Chartist leader Feargus O'Connor refuted the "Treasury View" -- aka "crowding out" -- in 1844. O'Connor's tract is long-winded and sentimentalized an idyllic past but it also contains some cogent analysis of why workers were (and should still be) wary of the exploitative use of technology by capitalist firms.O'Connor's critique took the form of a dialogue, which parodied and refuted an earlier dialogue, "The Employer and Employed,"...

I teach at Evergreen State College.  Early this spring I became alarmed at the rapid deterioration of collegiality and respect for dissent on campus, and I drafted a letter which I hoped to circulate for signatures—but I sat on it.  I thought: not enough faculty would be willing to sign and this would just expose how isolated I was in my concern.  Or: the letter would only add to the momentum for polarization, since, despite its protestations, it wouldn’t be seen as simply a statement about...

My earlier post needs a better title and a clear reason why Norway’s corporate profits were near 10% of its GDP even as it had a lower statutory corporate profits tax rate than nations like Australia or the U.S. Mark Thoma calls Norway an outlier: Since it looks like all that's been done here is to draw a line through an outlier, Norway … I haven't actually run the regression, but it looks clear to me that revenues rise with tax rates, and the fit also looks better than in the first graph....

Brad DeLong reminds us of Kevin DOW 36000 Hassett second dumbest moment giving credit to Mark Thoma for the original take down of Hassett’s Laffer trick: The Wall Street Journal says Kevin Hassett has discovered the Laffer curve, but I think these data might say something else ... The blue line is supposed to be the Laffer curve, but this is far from compelling. Since it looks like all that's been done here is to draw a line through an outlier, Norway (an outlier that in other contexts we...

Last month I posted a personal observation on Trump's plan to privatize infrastructure, noting especially how in the long run privately owned turnpikes in Virginia ended up in government ownership.  In the comments on that post there was discussion of the Indiana Toll Road, privatized a few years ago.  I have just ridden on it (yesterday), and I shall recount as an anecdote datum my less than pleasant experience, bad enough to make me want to avoid it entirely in the future.I was driving...

Definitely.Front  page story in today's Washington Post by Damien Paletta reports that "Treasury chief hurtles toward fiasco," the fiasco being a failure to raise the US debt ceiling in time to avoid a default.  Trump has declared that Sec Mnuchin is responsible for this matter, which he should be, but somehow has not made a sufficiently definitive statement to keep his former Freedom Caucus big cheese OMB director, Mulvaney, from opining that Mnuchin is an out of it New York finance guy...

I am adding yet more  to my most recent two posts where I am complaining about this essentially side remark that Larry Summers made in his commemoration of his late uncle, Kenneth Arrow, in which he reports that at the party celebrating Arrow's Nobel Prize in 1972, Summers's other uncle, the late Paul Samuelson was supposedly "discussing how stupid  Joan Robinson was."  As it is,  I should have added to my quote from his talk in the last post what immediately followed that snide and...

I would have included what follows in the previous post, but was afraid of putting too much into one post.  So, a bit more.Here is the precise quote from Summers's talk about the conversation between Ken Arrow and Paul Samuelson on the evening of the celebration in 1972 in Cambridge, MA."Almost everybody left and Paul and Kenneth were discussing turnpike theorems.  Kenneth was discussing aspects of Pontryagin's maximum principle.  Paul was discussing how stupid  Joan Robinson was."So somehow...

Ohmigod, he really did this. At the Institute for Advanced Study in Tel Aviv, during a major conference honoring his profoundly wise and honorable uncle, the late Kenneth Arrow, Larry did this. The vast majority of his talk is an outstanding discussion of Ken Arrow as an economist and a person, full of interesting details, all leading to the conclusion that his uncle was both one of the most brilliant economists who ever lived as well as a deeply wise,  personable, morally incorruptible, and...

Asher Schechter raises a good point in How Market Power Leads to Corporate Political Influence but this comparison is troublesome: In 2016, the advocacy group Global Justice Now published a report showing that 69 of the world’s largest 100 economic entities are now corporations, not governments. With annual revenues of $485.9 billion, Walmart topped all but nine countries. GDP is a value-added concept – revenue is not. So what is the right metric? Walmart may have had this much revenue...