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from David Ruccio I am quite willing to admit that, based on last Friday’s job report, the Second Great Depression is now over. As regular readers know, I have been using the analogy to the Great Depression of the 1930s to characterize the situation in the United States since late 2007. Then as now, it was not a recession but, instead, a depression. As I explain to my students in A Tale of Two Depressions, the National Bureau of Economic Research doesn’t have any official criteria for...

from Lars Syll The problem of any branch of knowledge is to systematize a set of particular observations in a more coherent form, called hypothesis or ‘theory.’ Two problems must be resolved by those attempting to develop theory: (1) finding agreement on what has been observed; (2) finding agreement on how to systematize those observations. In economics, there would be more agreement on the second point than on the first. Many would agree that using the short-hand rules of mathematics is...

Trumped up expectations fading only slowly, as confirmed by stocks, etc: A glimmer of hope seems to have faded: HighlightsThere’s plenty of help-wanted signs but still too few qualified applicants. Job openings in March totaled 5.743 million, up from a revised 5.682 million in February and well ahead of hirings which totaled 5.260 million. Professional & business services, where employers often turn to first when they can’t fill staff themselves, shows a strong rise...

from Dean Baker There are two enormous myths about global warming. One is that dealing with it is optional. The other is that the measures needed to slow the process will devastate the economy. Neither is true. On the first point, we are already seeing major changes in weather that are almost certainly related to global warming, both in the United States and around the world. In the United States, we are seeing rising water levels eroding beachfront property all along our coast lines. We...

Is there a neo-classical theory of immiseration? Below is the marvelous Chapman hours of labor diagram (follow the link for a more detailed explanation). It looks complicated but it really only contains four curves representing, roughly, long-term and short-term productivity, income and fatigue. But there is more to it than Chapman realized or that I have previously noticed. The context for this diagram is William Stanley Jevons’s discussion of work...

from Lars Syll In most aspects of their lives humans must plan forwards. They take decisions today that affect their future in complex interactions with the decisions of others. When taking such decisions, the available information is only ever a subset of the universe of past and present information, as no individual or group of individuals can be aware of all the relevant information. Hence, views or expectations about the future, relevant for their decisions, use a partial information...

anic rate First: the elephant in the room: the post 2008 development of the USA white employment rate relative to the black and hispanic rate is, in a historical perspective but also when compared with post 2008 developments in Europe, spectacular. though something seems to have been the matter since 1995. No explanation here but the correlation between the white and the other rates slowly fades away (a hypothesis might be that ‘Blacks’ and ‘Hispanics’ are groups which are characterized...

from Lars Syll The other day yours truly was sent a copy of the new edition of Chad Jones intermediate textbook Macroeconomics (4th ed, W W Norton, 2018). There’s much in the book I like, e. g. Jones’  combining of more traditional short-run macroeconomic analysis with an accessible coverage of the Romer model — the foundation of modern growth theory — and DSGE business cycle models. Unfortunately it also contains some utter nonsense! In chapter 7 — on “The Labor Market, Wages, and...

Not a pretty sight: