Anyway, it’s a great paper, which I highly recommend, both for its content and as a model for what useful empirical work in economics should look like. times Acceleration then you have a potentially quantitative would be the kind of theory for which actual numbers inquiry into the world? Obviously, it can conceivably be assigned. If Force equals Mass proliferating endlessly in the professional journals of insight into the flight of cannon balls, say. But the qualitative theorems (explicitly advocated in Samuelson’s great work of 1947, and thenceforth academic economics) don’t have any place fo ..read more

This piece was published in the to shut down the border to desperate asylum seekers. And internationally, it is committed to a Manichean view of the world where the United States is locked into a perpetual struggle for dominance with rivals like Russia and China. . At their request, I’ve taken the full text down from this site. You can . I will put the full piece back here in a month or two ..read more

Speaking of airlines, it’s easy in retrospect to see the subsidized loans to them and other pandemic-hit industries as excessive. But we don’t know what the counterfactual is — it’s possible that without public support, they would have collapsed into bankruptcy, leading to a much slower recovery. Certainly we couldn’t be sure at the time. Under the extraordinary circumstances of the pandemic, there was no safe course, only a balance of risks. The high inflation of 2021-2022 was unfortunate; a prolonged depression would have been much worse. Perhaps next time — and climate change ensures that t ..read more

China’s growth has been the clearest case yet of globalization’s promise that international trade can speed the convergence of poor countries with rich ones. The opportunity is still there for its broader promises to be fulfilled as well. But for that to happen, we in the United States must first accept that if the rest of the world catches up with us, that is something to be welcomed rather than feared. ) as arguing that the US can make serious climate deals with other countries while “boxing China out,” a view that seems to have won out over the more conciliatory position of advisors like Jo ..read more

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