Tag Archives: Taxes/regulation

This National Bureau of Economic research paper is behind a paywall, but the premise is up for discussion: This Paper challenges two widely held views: first that trade performance has been the primary reason for the declining share of manufacturing employment in the United States and other industrial economies, and second that recent productivity growth in manufacturing has actually been quite rapid but is not accurately measured. The paper shows that...

(Dan here…Social Security is an issue that seems to generate a lot of firm beliefs and passion, as witness recent threads.  It is rare that people refer to actuary material.  On the other sides of the issue are people like Andrew Biggs, who is knowledgeable and smart in his arguments.  I am posting this as a reminder to readers that contributors do usually go the extra mile…in this case even recently, and since 2008 with Dale, Bruce Webb, and Arne...

By Steve Roth  (from 2016 October 2) In the millennias-long evolution of human societies and economic systems, we find ourselves today at a pass where three systems predominate, and fitfully cohabit: democracy, capitalism, and socialism. Most countries in the world operate with large doses of all three. Given that, it might seem odd that there are so many loud and prominent political voices who talk about eradicating one or more of the three. These...

Rep. Tom Garrett is a Republican representing Virginia’s 5th Congressional District. He is a member of the Committees on Education and the Workforce, Homeland Security, and Foreign Affairs. He  presents a problem: We can’t afford to lose the energy, ideas, and vision of young people who give up their dreams of going to college because it is unaffordable. And we shouldn’t saddle young people who graduate with enormous debt, forcing them to postpone...

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I should title this: Yeah, it is just like 1929 you freak’n see, hear, and speak no inequality monkeys. I have this pile of income data sorted out from Saez’s work (the GDP is BEA). My thoughts regarding our economy is that income inequality (or equality) matters. It matters so much, that it is the all defining focus of government in a democracy. Every policy made should be judged against this goal of ever greater equality as we use the tool called...

Jennifer Berkshire pointed Peter Greene to: The election of Donald J. Trump as president offers the best opportunity in decades to shrink the size and power of government and increase individual liberty.  So writes the Heartland Institute, a libertarian thinky tank, on a page devoted to all the Trumpian actions they approve of. This outfit was founded in 1984 by David H. Padden, a Chicago investor who had also been a director of the CATO Institute....

(Dan B. here…I think it is still appropriate as it is a lesson yet to be learned.) by Divorced one like Bush (2009) I think it’s time to reread the World Bank report on what creates wealth because it seems that the arguments against the stimulus are from a mind-set of very narrow thinking about what creates wealth. They all seem focused on what the World Bank report calls “Produced Capital”. Unfortunately, focusing on just that aspect of capital reduces...

By Steve Roth (originally published at Evonomics) You Don’t Own That! The Evolution of OwnershipGet off my lawn.  (repost) In a recent post on the “evolution of money,” which concentrated heavily on the idea of (balance-sheet) assets, I promised to come back to the fundamental idea behind “assets”: ownership. Herewith, fulfilling that promise. There are a large handful of things that make humans uniquely different from animals. In many other areas —...

By Steve Roth (2015) Did Money Evolve? You Might (Not) Be Surprised You probably won’t be surprised to know that exchange, trade, reciprocity, tit for tat, and associated notions of “fairness” and “just deserts” have deep roots in humans’ evolutionary origins. We see expressions of these traits in capuchin monkeys and chimps (researchers created a “cash economy” where chimps were trained to exchange inedible tokens for food, then their trading behaviors...