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The litany of shorter work week prophecy is prodigious. Keynes famously predicted a 15-hour work week for “our grandchildren” in 1930. Fifteen years later, in a letter to T.S. Eliot, Keynes parenthetically suggested a 35-hour work week for the U.S. in the immediate post-war period. In 1961, Clyde Dankert cited a New York Times article from 1949 in which a “well known labor economist” predicted a 20-hour work week by 1990 and a ten hour week by 2050. Eight...

Last month revised lower and low and below expectations this month. Again, in line with decelerating credit data which means persistent weakness in GDP: Highlights Based on the consumer and based on inflation, FOMC members won’t be feeling much pressure to raise rates at least not any time soon. Consumer spending was unchanged in March, even weaker than Econoday’s 0.1 percent consensus. More startling is the weakest showing in 16-1/2 years for core PCE prices which fell 0.1...

from WEA Commentaries My first book since Debunking Economics has just been released in the UK, and will come out in May in the USA. Can we avoid another financial crisis? is a brief (140 page, 25,000 word) explanation for the lay reader of how the 2008 crisis was caused by factors that mainstream economics ignores—fundamentally, the levels of private debt and credit-based demand—and why other countries that avoided a crisis in 2008 are likely to suffer a similar crisis in the near...

From: Larry Hamilton and Merijn Knibbe Following a twitter discussion between him and me about the question if the 2013-2015 warming of the first 700 meters of ocean was above trend or if 2016 was below trend, Larry Hamilton (@ichiloe) produced the next graph (which shows consistent and relentless warming not just of the surface of the earth but also of the first 700 meters of the oceans). These series are as far as I know measured in a totally independent way. ‘2017’ are partial data. We...

Earlier this month, the Government Accounting Office released a report entitled Countering Violent Extremism”. Its a great example of how to outright lie using data. (I note that the, um, “analysis” was performed between October 2015 and April 2017, and bears the previous administration’s imprint. The current administration’s inanities lie in an orthogonal direction.) The upshot of the report is: GAO recommends that DHS and DOJ direct the CVE Task Force to...

from Peter Radford Simplification, in the context of an economy, is the eradication of all things of interest. This does not mean that studying an economy is thus doomed to be a pointless recitation of history as it unfolds. It is, rather, the recognition that as an economy moves through time it is never, to paraphrase Heraclitus, possible to see the same thing twice. Each economy is different. Each instance of the same economy is different. Any attempt to generalize eradicates those...

from Asad Zaman Environmentalist David Suzuki hits the nail on the head. The number of ways that economic theory systematically blinds you to the realities of the world we live in is almost uncountable. When Henry George’s land tax became widely popular, economists “disappeared” land as a factor of production from economic theories, merging it illegitimately with capital. Money is made to “disappear” by using the quantity theory of money to claim that money is veil. This makes it...

from Lars Syll Plenty of people will try to convince you that globalization and free trade could benefit everyone, if only the gains were more fairly shared … This belief is shared by almost all politicians … and it’s an article of faith for the economics profession. You are right to reject it … It’s a fallacy based on a fantasy, and it has been ever since David Ricardo dreamed up the idea of “Comparative Advantage and the Gains from Trade” two centuries ago. The best way to prove that...

A very low initial print, with inventories down as expected as was consumption growth. And the investment data that did grow strongly is volatile and subject to reversal which would limit q2 growth as well. Expectations have come off some but remain trumped up, even as the hard data shows ongoing weakness. And note how q2 forecasts are now starting up where q1 forecasts were this time 3 months ago: Highlights The weakest showing since the last recession for consumer...

On 6 April, Mario Draghi made a speech titled ‘Monetary policy and the economic recovery in the Euro Area’. I would have emphasized the existing disequilibria a little more: unemployment in Germany is not far away from ‘low’ but this comes at the cost of an 8% of GDP surplus of the current account. German domestic demand (investments, public and private consumption) is i.e. about 10% too low to guarantee low unemployment. See also this recent Eurostat press release, which shows that,...