EconoSpeak

Rudolf Meidner, one of the unsung economics heroes of the last century, argued for solidarity wages on several grounds, one of which is that low wages subsidize less efficient firms.*  Bring the bottom up, he said, and you will change the mix of enterprises and boost overall productivity.  It’s just a hypothesis, but here’s a bit of recent evidence from a pair of researchers: We study the impact of the minimum wage on firm exit in the restaurant industry, exploiting recent changes in the...

Over a time span of forty-four years, Kenneth Burke wrote a series of four essays beginning with "Waste -- or the Future of Prosperity," published in 1930, and concluding with "Why Satire, With a Plan for Writing One" in 1974. Between those two bookends were "Recipe for Prosperity: 'Borrow. Buy. Waste. Want.,'" in 1956 and "Towards Helhaven: Three Stages of a Vision," in 1971. Burke made explicit the affinity between the four essays in each successive iteration with repeated reference to...

While often on Mondays at the Washington Post, Robert J. Samuelson is spouting VSP lines about how we must be responsible and cut Social Security benefits.  However, today he has written on "What economists don't know," which comes across as a pretty big spanking for economists, among whom he does not make much differentiation.  We are all pretty much as ignorant as each other and just plain not willing to admit it, given that we are also all (actually here he admits not all) trying to "gain...

Amid the blooming flowers of May, each year sees the arrival of the Papers and Proceedings volume of the American Economic Review, containing short and sometimes punchy gleanings from the previous ASSA meetings.  Here are two abstracts of interest.  I haven’t gone through the papers themselves, so I can’t vouch for their methodologies, but the results they claim to have found are politically important.Title: Student Debt and Labor Market Outcomes Authors: Gerald Eric Daniels Jr. and Andria...

I’ve been thinking about alternatives to capitalism for a long time now.  I’ve taught several courses on the topic and plan eventually to write up what I think I’ve learned, so naturally I was intrigued by the new book, The People's Republic of Wal-Mart: How the World's Biggest Corporations Are Laying the Foundation for Socialism (PRW) by Leigh Phillips and Michal Rozworski.  I picked up a copy and started reading it, intending to write a review for this blog.Well, I stopped about a quarter...

Question for Jeff Bezos: Will your orbiting space habitats have Whipping Rooms?

This is one of the last things I was expecting to see happen; that a referendum in Denver would effectively decriminalize magic mushrooms or more specifically the main constituent component of them, the psychedelic drug, psilocybin.  But this has happened in the Mile High City, if by a narrow margin.  I largely welcome this.  After all, it has always been sort of ridiculous to arrest someone for owning a naturally growing mushroom, especially one known to grow especially in cowpies.This gets...

So for the fourth year in a row, we along with our closely associated blog, Angry Bear, have been listed as among the top 100 economics blogs.  We continue to be put into the category of "financial economics," as we were last year, with little change in our description.But, hey, I am not going to complain. Quite a few blogs formerly on the list are off, replaced by the up and coming.  If there is a part of the description of us I am uncomfortable with it is the claim, made in the past as...

It was a year ago today that President Trump removed the United States from the JCPOA nuclear agreement with Iran as well as Russia, China, UK, France, Germany, and the EU, under the auuspices of the UN Security Council.  Accoerding to IAEA inspectors, Iran was fulfilling its part of the agreement, and it has continued to do so up  until now as well, despite thi s unwarranted action by the US, although that may be about to change.  The other signatories have strongly opposed the US action,...

Yes, this is going to all be about me! :-)So, before getting to me, me, me, let me congratulate Emi Nakamura of the UC-Berkeley economics dept for receiving the John Bates Clark Award. It seems to be well deserved for her innovative and influential work on looking at high frequency detailed micro data sets to get more accurate estimates of macro variables, including both inflation rates and fiscal multipliers.  At 38 she is young enough (one must be under 40).  She is also now a coeditor of...