Naked Keynesianism

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By the way, if you count workers employed full time only in August this year we surpassed the December 2007 peak, and after a fall in September, we're over again now. So it took only about 8 years to get back were we were. Yes, the economy is peachy.

New Employment Situation Report is out. Not bad, given the last couple of months. In October, total nonfarm payroll employment increased by 271,000 and the unemployment rate is at 5%. The employment-population ratio, which seemed to start to inch up last year, however, now looks again stagnant. Even though it seems markets are happy with job creation above 200k per month, we need something more like 400 for a healthy recovery, and to bring the employment-population ratio up. Earnings have...

Recently NPR had a story about the criminalization of poverty in the US, and the fact that now poor people that get a parking ticket and the fees that go with that for processing, for court expenses, and what not, may end up in jail. At least now a series of lawsuits are challenging this kind of abuse.

As I noted before I've been teaching a Political Economy course, which I assumed right before classes began, and, I decided to keep the textbook, since it was already ordered. The book is written by Bowles, Edwards, and in the last edition, Roosevelt and is titled Understanding Capitalism. I discussed before the meaning of capitalism here (see also this on the use of the term capitalism as a proxy for free market policies).Here just a brief comment on the use of the idea of modes of...

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BEA released the advanced estimate for GDP growth in the third quarter, 1.5%, well below the 3.9% growth of the second quarter. One can see that the recent recovery is slow even when compared to the Clinton and Bush II recoveries. So, nothing new, the slow recovery continues. If the budget deal gives some hope that at least we're not going to shutdown the government, and as a result avoid an even worse slowdown, there is very little reason to hope for the kind of fiscal stimulus we need.

<br /> Lecture at the Renner Insitute in Vienna, October 6.

New Working Paper by Ahmad Borazan. From the abstract: It has become commonplace to raise the analogy between the recent experience of the dynamics of income distribution and growth, and that of the era before the Great Depression. However, no study of the demand regime has been done for the early twentieth century period; this study attempts to fill that gap in the literature. Based on a Kaldorian model, I estimate whether the demand regime of the pre-Great Depression era for private...