Even if successful, this strategy wouldn’t spell the end of employer insurance overnight. 59% of non-elderly Americans receive insurance through their or their family’s employer; that’s a lot of people, and it would still be a lot of people even if employers began to drop coverage. But it’s easy to imagine a virtuous cycle where, as Medicaid and individual market populations grow, a large and diverse constituency grows for improving them. In the long run, the prospects for truly universal healthcare might be far better than they are today.  policymaking than does the employer marketplace ..read more

The good news is that, as I’ve in September. My previous pieces are  according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics , the Fed is not all-powerful. The current round of rate hikes has not, so far, done much to cool off the labor market. If that continues to be the case, then we may be in for a period of sustained productivity growth and rising income. is typical. It discusses faster productivity growth almost entirely in terms of the new technologies — AI, Zoom, internet shopping — that might, or might not, be contributing. Not until 40 paragraphs in is there a brief mention of the strong lab ..read more

Third is the fact that trade adjustment happens mainly thru entry/exit rather than expenditure switching in product markets. This means in effect that the balance sheets of exporting firms act as shock absorbers. Let’s say that a country’s financial assets become more desirable to global wealth owners, causing a financial inflow and (plausibly though not necessarily) an appreciation of its currency. In the textbook story, this leads to an equal and immediate fall in net exports. But in reality, with exports priced in global markets, the immediate effect is a fall in the profitability of export ..read more

A second purpose of this list is to show how these are not just academic questions, but have important implications for our efforts to, in , become masters the happenings of real life. To be sure, this post doesn’t do this. But it was a goal of the class. And it is very much a goal of the book. But it’s constantly ignored or forgotten by people who think of themselves as Keynesians. In general, it seems to me, debates connected with money are less often about disagreements on substantive issues than about different premises, which are seldom recognized or acknowledged. Before denouncing each o ..read more

Eich doesn’t dispute this, as a description of what Marx actually he wrote.. But he argues that this rejection of finance as a site of political action was based on the specific conditions of the times. Today, though, the power and salience of organized labor has diminished. Meanwhile, central banks are more visible as sites of power, and the allocation of credit is a major political issue. A Marx writing now, he suggests, might take a different view on the value of monetary reform to a socialist program. I’m not sure, though, if this is a judgment that many people inspired by Marx would share ..read more

In addition, we strongly uphold the principle of academic freedom, especially in light of the current global climate where individuals in educational institutions worldwide face termination, doxing, and harassment for speaking up against the atrocities of the Israeli state and in support of the civilian population in Gaza. Neglecting this commitment would be a betrayal of our scholarly and moral obligations ..read more

My neighbor Stephanie Luce, who spent many years working in the Living Wage movement, often points out that the direct impact of those measures was in general quite small. But that does not mean that all the hard work and organizing that went into them was wasted. A more important contribution, she  Prices will remain an important political question, even if inflation is not. , is that they establish a moral vision and language around wages. Beyond their direct effects, living wage campaigns help shift discussions of wage-setting from economic criteria to questions of fairness and ju ..read more

[Thanks to Caleb Crain for pointing out a mistake in an earlier version of this post.] . I’ve given a couple video presentations on these questions recently. One, last Friday, was for Senate staffers. Amusingly —to me anyway — the person they had to speak on this topic  last year was Jason Furman. Who I imagine had a rather different take. The on Monday I was on a panel organized by the Groundwork Collaborative, comparing the economic response to the pandemic to the response to the financial crisis a decade ago. That one is , if you are interested. The first part is a presenation by Heath ..read more

But that’s a topic for another time. For now it’s enough to say: Don’t thank the Fed. , about how important rates really are for business investment. In any case, no story about interest rates that depends on their effects on investment spending can explain the recent fall in inflation.  , like most publications I’ve worked with, prefers to use graphics produced by their own team. For this post, I’ve swapped out theirs for my original versions.) signs of a gently slowing economy ..read more

To be sure, hardly anyone in either camp correctly predicted the 2021 surge in inflation, or its equally dramatic decline over the past year. So it’s too soon to declare victory yet. But for the moment, it’s Team Weber and not Team Summers that seems to be gaining ground. , demand is no weaker than it was a year ago. If it’s interest rates that brought down inflation, how exactly did they do so? about how much rate hikes have actually achieved. Inflation has declined steeply without Summers’ prescribed three years of over-5% unemployment, or indeed any noticeable rise in unemployment at all. B ..read more