EconoSpeak

That would be Nouriel Roubini of NYU who got his moniker back during the Great Recession, which he called pretty well in 2006.  He did this clearly yesterday in an interview in The Intelligencer, although he has been pushing something like this for some time now, bringing in all sorts of things like climate change and more pandemics to reinforce this long run forecasr, although he thinks in a decade there may be a sufficient restrucuting of the economy to improve the situation.  While he...

Yet again I am upset that we are getting ads for Trump here.  I have made an inquiry to a knowledgeable person, and I have not been given a clear explanation for why all these ads are appearing here, with there seeeming to be more and more of them all the time.  I do wish to say that I do not believe any of us are getting  any money for any of this; I certainly am not.  And I wish they would go away.  But I do not know how to do it, and nobody else around here that I have communicated with...

We live in a drastically unequal society.  Everywhere you look you will find injustice, constraint and exploitation.  Being a member of a racial or other minority increases the odds you will end up on the short end, so what should we do about it?  There’s a progressive solution, to change the system so injustice, constraint and exploitation are minimized.  And then there’s the woke solution, to demand benefits targeted to minorities (and women) that will more evenly distribute the injustice,...

Oliver Williamson died yesterday at age 87, I do not know of what. He was famous as the main developer of New Institutional Economics, following the influence of Ronald Coase, which emphasizes the role of transactions costs in the formation and development of economic (and some other) institutions.  He received the Nobel Prize in 2009, along with Elinor Ostrom, but his influence was really quite vast for a man from a working class background, born in Superior, Wisconsin.I checked, and...

I took up this invitation from Dan Shaviro: tomorrow morning I'll be participating in a very interesting international tax policy conference with a number of outstanding participants. It's on Zoom … I'm actually the second speaker on Panel II (although we're listed above alphabetically), so I will be speaking from roughly 11:08 to 11:15. I'm planning to discuss the OECD's Pillar 1 and Pillar 2 initiatives, although what exactly I'll say remains somewhat flexible pending the keynote...

Here I am using what is the journalistic definition of a "recession," also used in many nations although not officially in the US, where these things are determined ex post by an NBER committee.  Anyway, that "journalistic" definition is that there be two consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth.  Today in the Washington Post I saw a story on global carbon emissions, which are very closedly correlated with GDP, if not perfectly. Anyway, it appears that global carbon emissions hit bottom...

I know, I should probably not waste everybody's time commenting on this nonsense, but the push on it has been masssive, with it seeming to influence a lot of people it should not, so I have decided some pushback is called for, even if those who should see it do not.   I am partly triggered in this by getting defriended on Facebook yesterday by a generally intelligent libertarian academic economist I know who started massively linking to every crackpot pushing this nonsense, and when I...

A very interesting paper (not peer-reviewed) by a team of Israeli scholars proposes that a more manageable exit from pandemic lockdown might be achieved by implementing a scheme in which employees go in to work for four days and then return to isolation for ten days before repeating the cycle. A variation on the proposal would have two staggered relays of workers cycling through the 14 day routine.The research has been popularized in a New York Times op-ed and a Fast Company feature, so I...

Donald Trump, cheering on his “warriors” who demand that states lift their lockdown and distancing orders (where they have them), would have you believe this is about bringing the economy back to life so ordinary people can get their jobs and normal lives back.  Elitist liberals who work from home and have country estates to retreat to don’t care, but “real” people do.The reality is different.  The shuttering of stores, restaurants, hotels and workplaces didn’t begin with government orders...

Dr. Anthony Fauci has testified before a Senate committee that he is worried that there may be a serious "Second Wave" oof the current SARS-CoV-2 pandemic in the United States.  The basis for this fear is the experience over a century ago with the Spanish flu, still deadlier than the current pandemic.  It came in three full waves, and of those the second was easily substantially larger than the other two.  The lag between the first and second was several months, and as of now no nation that...