Maybe if I’d pushed harder I could have got somewhere. But the obstacles were real, and no one seemed to agree with me, so I gave up, and eventually left the steering committee. (Life is too short to be on too many committees.) But I still think I was right. , to open access. Here you are, I thought, doing work that’s supposed to be part of a larger transformative project, that is relevant not just for other academics but for workers and activists. So why are you enlisting the power of the state to stop people from reading it? No, I think that’s it for now. But don’t worry – there will be anot ..read more

ETA: As it happens, I went to graduate school with Munif’s son Yasser. He was in the sociology department while I was in economics and we used to hang out quite a bit, tho I haven’t seen him in some years. . I will also be writing a piece for . I just finished the novel trilogy, though the first chronologically. The first novel, also called that will be in part a response to Benanav but mostly, I hope, an intervention to move the debate in a more positive direction. by Abdelrahman Munif. It’s the third novel in the . I disagree with a lot of what he wrote, which is fine; he, as he made very cl ..read more

At its most recent meeting, the This is my contribution for March 2023; you can find the earlier ones was for the unemployment rate to rise one point over the next year, and then stabilize. Anything is possible, of course. But in the seven decades since World War Two, there is no precedent for this. in the unemployment rate of a half a point has been followed by a substantial further rise, usually of two points or more, and a recession. (A version of this pattern is known as the .) Maybe we will have a soft landing this time. But it would be the first one ..read more

You should read it! A final point I want to emphasize here is that we are not saying that supply constraints  limits on adjustment speed in an absolute, universal sense. We are saying that insofar as we need a simple, first-cut description of the supply side, we will usually do better to imagine a constraint on adjustment speed rather than on the level of output and employment. The linked version is our draft; when the published version comes out I’ll post that.) Specific examples and evidence on all these points are in ..read more

It’s easy to understand why administration officials would say they trust the Fed to manage inflation, while they focus on being in history. Unfortunately, dividing things up this way may not be as simple as it sounds. If that’s what they think their job is, they may have to challenge how the Fed thinks about its own. the 10 years prior to the pandemic While Powell clearly still sees wage growth as excessive, others might look at the latest Employment Cost Index—less than 1% growth, compared with 1.4% at the start of 2022—and see a problem taking care of itself. that any revival of organized l ..read more

It seems to me that if social scientists are going to borrow something from the practices of Newton and his successors, it shouldn’t be an aversion to “ambiguous words,” the use calculus or geometric proofs, or the formulation of universal mathematical laws. It should be his recognition of the vast ocean of our ignorance. We need to accept that on most important questions we don’t know the answers and probably cannot know them. Then maybe we can recognize the small pebbles of knowledge that are accessible to us. don’t have a hard science of human society, it’s simply because no one has ye ..read more

It’s a big mistake, in my opinion, to debate inflation in isolation, or to think that debates over inflation are going to be resolved with statistical tests. We first need to step back and think carefully about what question we are trying to answer, and about what account of inflation is consistent with our broader intellectual commitments. The reason I disagree with someone like Jason Furman about inflation isn’t because I have a different read on this or that data series. (I like his empirical work!) We see inflation differently because we have different ideas about how the world works. choi ..read more

(I am now writing a monthly opinion piece for is exceptionally tight, at least by the standards of recent history. That matters for monetary policy, but its importance goes beyond inflation, or even material living standards. We are used to a world where workers compete for jobs. A world where businesses compete for workers would look very different ..read more

To listen to economic policy debates today, you would think the U.S. economy has just one problem: inflation. When Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell was asked at if there was a danger in going too far in the fight against inflation, his answer was unequivocal: “The worst mistake we could make is to fail—it’s not an option. We have to restore price stability…because [it’s] everything, it’s the bedrock of the economy. If you don’t have price stability, the economy’s really not going to work ..read more

Almost everyone, it seems, now that higher interest rates mean economic pain. This pain is usually thought of in terms of lost jobs and shuttered businesses. Those costs are very real. But there’s another cost of rate increases that is less discussed: their effect on balance sheets ..read more