EconoSpeak

Nobody is calling it that, but the low key story on the back pages of today's major papers report that this is what has happened, not to my surprise.  September 29 (or maybe the 30th at a stretch) is the deadline for President Trump to submit to the Congress the final version of the US-Mexico trade deal if there is any chance of it being passed by the US Senate in time for outgoing Mexican President Pena Nieto to sign it on his lats day in office on November 30 after the outgoing Mexican...

As the number of workmen that can be kept in employment by any particular person must bear a certain proportion to his capital, so the number of those that can be continually employed by all the members of a great society must bear a certain proportion to the whole capital of that society, and never can exceed that proportion. -- Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations An"invisible hand" reaches up out of the subterranean depths of that "whole capital" periodically to re-establish the "certain...

Many thanks to Peter Dorman for highlighting Citizens United As Bad Corporate Law. I guess we had to endure this comment, which is a really weak rebuttal: Corporate shareholders are most definitely owners; they alone have the authority to sell their shares or the company's assets. Their rights are based not on contract law but statutory rules of franchise. They are guaranteed rights of assembly abd representation, and they cannot legally surrender those rights even if they elect Directors...

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...