EconoSpeak

I saw this film several weeks ago and have been meaning to say a few things about it.  Herewith:1. This is an exceptionally intelligent movie by American standards.  It maintains a high level of wit and observation from beginning to end, and little zingers flash by in almost every frame without announcing themselves.  It speaks up to its audience, something I really appreciate.2. STBY fits into a tradition of films in which the act of organizing a union and carrying out a job action is...

I admit I haven’t paid too much attention to debates over Citizens United, since I regard the direction taken by regulation, control over who may contribute to political campaigns and how much they can put up, to be misguided.  I would like to see comprehensive control over how much money can be spent on behalf of candidates, period.  (I would also like to see a mandate that all such contributions be funneled through an intermediary, like a public political finance fund, that keeps the...

What are we talking about when we talk about a bad metaphor for the second derivative of an abstraction?There was a bunch of stuff. Here is another bunch of stuff. Did the first bunch of stuff turn into the second bunch of stuff? Did it grow? Did it shrink? Did bunch of stuff "A" liquefy, solidify or evaporate into bunch of stuff "B"?What are we talking about when we talk about a bad metaphor for the second derivative of an abstraction?No. You tell me.

That would be several stories in both the New York Times and the Washington Post over the last two days: Trump's policy against Iran is a great success and it  is completely reasonable and justified. This reporting and columnizing has followed three tracks.One was in a column yesterday in WaPo from Mark Thiessen of AEI, generally pro-Trump.  His column was about how Trump in general doing well on foreign policy, although with no mention of the trade war.  He did not spend much time on Iran,...

In "De-growth vs a Green New Deal," Robert Pollin relies on the same blurring of distinctions that Robert Solow employed 46 years earlier in his condemnation of The Limits to Growth as "bad science." Nicholaus Georgescu-Roegen pointed out Solow's obfuscation in the article that inspired the term "degrowth." That historical context is vital for understanding why Pollin's "blueprint for ecological salvation" is no advance over Solow's. In "Is theEnd of the World at Hand" Solow scolded the "bad...

Ruth Sutherland wrote in The Daily Mail a couple of days ago: Here is how Keynes "ignored" those "workaholic tendencies": Yet there is no country and no people, I think, who can look forward to the age of leisure and of abundance without a dread. For we have been trained too long to strive and not to enjoy. It is a fearful problem for the ordinary person, with no special talents, to occupy himself, especially if he no longer has roots in the soil or in custom or in the beloved conventions...

These days are the tenth anniversary of the biggest Minsky Moment since the Great Depression.  While when it happened most commentators mentioned Minsky and many even called it a "Minsky Moment," most of the commentary now does not use that term and much does not even mention Minsky, much less Charles Kindleberger or Keynes.  Rather much of the discussion has focused now on the failure of Lehman Brothers on September 15, 2017.  A new book by Lawrence Ball has argued that the Fed could have...

I just now got around to reading some May 11 speech by Donald Trump who says he wants to reign in the high price of drugs. A laudable goal and Trump said some things that got applause. But ahem – he may no clue especially when he says things like this: We’re very much eliminating the middlemen. The middlemen became very, very rich. Right? (Applause.) Whoever those middlemen were — and a lot of people never even figured it out — they’re rich. They won’t be so rich anymore. Nancy L....

In the Sept. 14 Washington Post, Josh Rogin is all shocked and upset about a report that people in the US Treasury Department, apparently supported by, if not outright led by, Secretary Steve Mnuchin, have been stonewalling or slow-moving a memo that was ordered up by President Trump in late July in order to implement the fully renewed financial sanctions against Iran, specifically to disallow Iranian banks from using the international SWIFT settlement system, which was imposed on them in...

I returned a few days ago from a conference in Italy where I spoke with some former economic  advisers of the Five Star Movement )M5S), which is now in a coalition government with the hard right wing Lega, formerly the separatist Northern League, which has now gone national, appealing to southern Italy with a strong anti-immigrant push.  While the not very exciting M5S leaders push for a minimum income guarantee,  Lega's Matteo Salvini as Interior  Minister has been capturing all the public...