Tag Archives: news

A PLOG is a ´Persistent Large Output Gap´. Read: a long period of high unemployment. Literature about PLOGs tries to mitigate one of the ideas of economic orthodoxy, especially the unsubstantiated idea that lowering high post-economic crisis unemployment will fuel inflation. According to this literature, which is quite empirical, it doesn´t. However, this somewhat older literature does not yet consider the post-2009 Euro Area experience. Here, I will propose an updated definition of...

Who decides what statistical offices measure and how they measure it? And what are the implicit values embedded in these decisions? Recently, the ILO issued a new manual on measuring productivity. Below, I´ll discuss the questions posed. But for starters, it is essential to realize that economists measure monetary productivity, not physical productivity, which leads to problems with ever-changing prices. This will be part of the discussion. The ILO (International Labour Organization)...

from Peter Radford Take four. I continue to listen in on the conversation. The election reverberates loudly around leftish circles. Recriminations mount. Criticisms fly. Finger pointing and over-analysis have become all too common. And this is after just a week. Imagine what a month can produce. So far the central narrative seems to be that the Democrats have become isolated from the most consequential issues that regular folk feel are important. The explanation being that the party is...

Eurostat published new data on employment in Europe. Average employment growth is +0,9%. The average hides stark differences. A Germany-centered core consisting of Germany, Austria, Sweden, Estonia, Finland, and Hungary shows declines. Surprisingly, it excludes Denmark, Belgium and the Netherlands. The South does better. Countries like Portugal, France, Greece, and, especially, Spain post above-average increases. But unemployment in these countries is still high (over 5%), even when EU...

11th of November 2024 My Lords, there are many things to welcome in this Budget, particularly on the spending side. I am less keen on some of the tax proposals, which seem to be mean-minded and counterproductive, such as the tax on knowledge. The spending commitments are important because they reverse the disastrous policy of austerity, which has brought our public services and infrastructure close to collapse. Even the IMF, originally a champion of austerity, admitted that it had...

The new UN report on deaths in Gaza makes for Grim Reading. According to the admirable work of UN data sleuths, details close to 10.000 of the official 40.000+ deaths have been added. These are only the direct victims; indirect victims (starvation, stress, sickness) are omitted. One of the findings is that, unlike during earlier periods of war in Gaza, killing is indiscriminate. Many of the victims were women and children (graphs). The youngest victim was one day old, and the oldest was...

from Peter Radford Battle is joined … This might annoy some of you — it is my hasty first thought. The Democrats have been thoroughly defeated.  Deservedly so.  They no longer relate to, or reflect, the American working class.  Without building such a relationship they cannot regain power.  Nor should they. Yesterday, early on the morning of election day,  a friend of mine forwarded an article by Robert Reich who argued that, in order to defeat Trump, Harris needed to focus more on the...

from Peter Radford Well done AJR.  A prize deserved.  And remarkably little grumbling.  What’s wrong with that? In other news, my wife is deep into creating an artificial intelligence application.  One of the great challenges of getting AI to be useful is something called ‘prompt engineering’.   What have these two snippets of news have in common? The great thing about our better economists — the triumvirate we know affectionately as AJR being an example — is that they all seem to...

from Steven Klees I am quite sure that this year’s three Nobel Laureates in economics — Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and James Robinson – are very competent new institutionalist economists.  Lars Syll offers a thoughtful critique of their substantive arguments, but he misses the main point for me.  New institutional economics, by and large, is nonsense.  We used to have many sensible institutional economists who offered a qualitative, sociological-type analysis of the role of economic...

17th of October, 2024 Over the years, “Fortress Europe” has relied on a mix of bribery and force to keep out undocumented migrants fleeing wars, famine, and conditions of extreme poverty in Sub-Saharan Africa. But such measures are no solution to a problem that ultimately stems from much larger global and historical forces. LONDON – In 2023, 150,000 migrants crossed the Central Mediterranean in small boats from North Africa, fleeing war, pestilence, and starvation in their own...