Tag Archives: US/Global Economics

November JOLTS report: imagine, if you will, a game of musical chairs, New Deal democrat Imagine a game like musical chairs, except that some players are the chairs (employers) as well as people who want to sit in the chairs (potential employees), and players, both sitters and chairs, are continually entering and exiting the game. The game would be in equilibrium if the number of sitters and chairs are always equal. If there are more...

This Life: faith, work, and free time The blurbs on the first few pages of Martin Hägglund’s This Life are so surprisingly accurate that it would be hard to describe the book with an original superlative. “Monumental!” “Powerful!” “Important!” “Electrifying!” “Profound, thoughtful, compelling, and insightful!” Those blurbs were not idle puffery. All that is left for me to add is that I liked it very much. Oh, just one more thing… Hägglund’s...

To say that the Republican Party since Nixon had pandered to the lowest common denominator isn’t quite accurate, is it? Probably because the term is derived from the arithmetical least common denominator which makes one think of a unique number. Perhaps lowest common denominator was a more polite way of saying that the Republican Party would thenceforth pander to lowbrows, to their basest; to ignorance. Theirs was a war on elites, and, of course,...

Prof. Joel Eissenberg, Upfront Blog For Christmas 2021, Linda gave me a copy of “The St. Louis Commune of 1877: Communism in the Heartland” by Mark Kruger. The title certainly grabbed my attention. Having read it, there’s somewhat less than meets the eye here. The reason I never heard of this before is that the “commune” was very brief and poorly organized, and the history has been mostly ignored, since the historical impact on St. Louis...

Mr. Etcetera The subtitle of T. R. Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population advertised its inclusion of “remarks on the speculations of Mr. Godwin, M. Condorcet, and other writers.” In volume I of Capital, Marx did not mention William Godwin’s name.  One might say, rather, that Marx studiously avoided mentioning Godwin. He did, however, engage in a sustained disparagement of Malthus — particularly his essay on population. This alone would...

Dare I Disagree With David Ignatius?  In today’s Washington Post (Dec. 31 ), intel columnist David Ignatius had a ten question multiple choice quiz about what will happen in 2022. He provided his own answers at the end, effectively forecasting.  Many I agree with and some, speculative about tech developments and such like, I have no opinion on.  However, on two very important ones, I think I disagree with him, if not overwhelmingly so. One of...

Commenter and Blogger RJS, Perspective: I (RJS) suspect some of the inventory pullback has to do with tax strategies, but we’ve had all this sitting near multiyear lows going in, so they’re worth noting. I checked googled, & I don’t see anyone else reporting these lows, even at sites like oilprice.com. They’re probably on deadlines to get their articles done, and don’t have time to check the spreadsheets. Strategic Petroleum: Reserve at...

Paul Samuelson On Knut Wicksell  Something I have been doing for several years now is serving as Senior Coeditor of the Fourth Edition of the New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics, with the original one published back in 1894 in London (my coeditors are Matias Vernengo and Esteban Perez). As part of this effort, a multi-year project, I have been reading cover-to-cover, the entire Third Edition, co-edited by Steve Durlauf and Larry Blume, which came...

The labor market closes out 2021 on the best note yet The final economic data in 2021 was this morning’s report on initial and continued jobless claims. And the good news for workers continued. New claims declined back under 200,000 to 198,000, the best pandemic showing except for November 20’s 194,000, and December 4’s 188,000. The 4 week average of new claims declined to 199,250: This is the best showing for the 4 week average in over...

A Free Market is Always Full of Cheap Ideas I may have scoffed in the past at the notion of “the marketplace of ideas” but I am coming around to think that maybe it’s not such a bad metaphor. Back in the days of primitive economy, families, clans, tribes produced and consumed their own subsistence. If a surplus was produced beyond what was to be set aside for contingencies, it might be given as a gift to a neighboring group, setting up the...