J. Bradford DeLong's Blog, page 309

Comment of the Day: Phil Koop: Hoisted from teh Archives:...

Comment of the Day: Phil Koop: Hoisted from teh Archives: Joseph Schumpeter on "Liquidationism": "'How very strange it is for Schumpeter to be laying out his depressions-cause-structural-change-and-growth theory of business cycles at the very same moment that he is also laying out his entrepreneurs-disrupt-the-circular-flow-and-cause-structural-change-and-growth-theory of enterprise'...

...Is it not equally odd that he recognizes the necessity of fiscal measures-"...relief: Not only imperative on moral and social grounds, but also an important means to keep up the current of economic life and to steady demand..."-but cannot accept their sufficiency? It is as though he is saying to Keynes, "yes, yes, to be sure, the magneto is broken and the car will not run until it is repaired, but do not let that distract you from the essential task of converting it to a dirigible!"

One seldom sees a clearer example of a keen intelligence deployed to rationalize an untenable position rather than to find one that is satisfactory:

The crucial point of these reforms lies in the coincidence of a political atmosphere exceptionally favorable, and an economic situation exceptionally unfavorable to their success. No doubt they will always be carried amidst enthusiastic clapping of hands. But they will also be stigmatized in the future by their tendency to prevent or retard recovery...

"Yes, in retrospect the measures that I advocate appear to have failed. But that is an illusion! If only the economic situation had been more favourable, such that these measures would have been unnecessary, they would surely have succeeded!" He never notices that this claim is incompatible with the belief that depressions are necessary to purge "maladjustments" and cure moral excesses...

#shouldread

Dan Drezner: Robert Gilpin, R.I.P.: "I never met Gilpin i...

Dan Drezner: Robert Gilpin, R.I.P.: "I never met Gilpin in person���in contrast to many colleagues, once he retired, he left the field for good. It���s my loss. I became enamored with his ideas while in graduate school... an excellent intellectual history of how realists thought about the politics of the world economy...

...Gipin���s greatest work will always be ���War and Change in World Politics.��� Although written in 1981, the theory is perhaps more trenchant now than then. Gilpin offered his variant of hegemonic stability theory. This theory posits that a rising superpower has a strong incentive to structure the global rules of the game in a manner favorable to that state���s economy and polity. In return, however, the hegemon will provide the necessary global public goods to ensure that other states prosper in this system. Peace and prosperity can thrive when this kind equilibrium holds. Gilpin���s argument stands out... his prose... clearly written and clearly argued.... Gilpin���s story of hegemonic decline, which was both detailed and prescient.... Gilpin warned about the ���corrupting influence of affluence��� on the hegemon. See if this sounds familiar:

Perhaps the most pernicious aspect of this ���corruption��� (a term used in its classical sense to mean decay) is the generation in the minds of a dominant people of the belief that the world they (or, rather, their forebears) created is the right, natural, and God-given state of affairs. To such a people the idea that the world of their rule and privilege could be otherwise becomes inconceivable. The goodness and benefits of the status quo, as they know it, are so obvious that all reasonable men will assent to its worth and preservation. With such a state of mind, a people neither concedes to the just demands of rising challengers nor makes the necessary sacrifices to defend its threatened world.

Think of those U.S. elites who downplayed the populist revolt to globalization. Think of the current U.S. elites who are trying to stop making any sacrifice for anything beyond America���s borders. And then read that paragraph, published in 1981, again. There���s a reason Gilpin���s work remains highly relevant today...

#shouldread

I find myself wishing that Ricardo had given us some numb...

I find myself wishing that Ricardo had given us some numbers here: How much in the way of resources has the government raised from society via its inflation? And how have those resource flows declined since the 2015 decision to monetize the fiscal deficit?: Ricardo Hausmann: The Venality of Evil: "Inflation in Venezuela... [at] 1,000,000% by year���s end... GDP... 45% below its 2013 level by the same time...

...How is it... that Venezuela can have a GDP contraction that dwarfs that of the Great Depression... while simultaneously generating hyperinflation of a magnitude seen only in Germany in 1923 or Zimbabwe in 2008-2009?... The government used the oil boom that started in 2004 to disempower society and enhance state control over production and the market, while borrowing massively in international markets. Although state control was detrimental to production, the government could shelter the public from its consequences through subsidized imports, which further damaged domestic production.... 2013, the government... had... [lost] access to international capital markets, triggering... recession..... 2014, the price of oil fell sharply, making the previous import level unsustainable and triggering a much deeper collapse..... Even members of President Nicol��s Maduro���s administration pushed for a return to more market-friendly policies and for international financial support. Instead, Maduro���s government doubled down, deepening distortionary controls.... Clear by the end of 2015 that a major collapse was coming���and even that a famine was in the making. Nothing was done to prevent it. Offers of humanitarian assistance were refused. With imports, output, and tax revenues collapsing, the government opted to print the money needed to cover the fiscal deficit, triggering hyperinflation.

But while the ���how��� of the Venezuelan collapse is clear and was predicted ex ante, the ���why��� question is harder to answer.... Allan Drazen and Alberto Alesina suggested that economic stabilization might be delayed because two contending groups are trapped in a war of attrition; all understand that adjustment is necessary but expect the other group to bear the brunt of the cost. By delaying, they provide information to the other group about their willingness to withstand the pain. The process continues until one group capitulates.... But in a totalitarian regime such as Venezuela���and with Cuba calling the reform shots���it is hard to tell who is trapped in a war of attrition with whom. Ignorance is a weak explanation.... Plenty of one-time Chavistas pleaded for a change of policy.... Ignorance was a deliberate choice.

That leaves intent. The government chose this course of action because it felt that it was better than the alternatives. But it is difficult to imagine courses of action with worse outcomes for millions of people than the current one. What are we missing?... The regime... bought off as many henchmen, through venal means, as it would need. Yes, the catastrophe would weaken the regime; but society would weaken even faster, assuring the regime continued control. The Oxford English Dictionary defines ���evil��� as ���doing or intending to do harm.��� Ultimately, there is no other plausible explanation...

#shouldread

Hoisted from teh Archives: Joseph Schumpeter on "Liquidationism"

Today's Economic History: Joseph Schumpeter on "Liquidationism": "Three things strike me while rereading Schumpeter's 1934 "Depressions" (and also his 1927 Explanation of the Business Cycle):

How much smarter Schumpeter is than our modern liquidationists and austerians--he says a great many true things in and amongst the chaff, which is created by his fundamentally mistaken belief that structural adjustment must be triggered by a downturn and a wave of bankruptcies that releases resources into unemployment. How much more fun and useful it would be right now to be debating a Schumpeter right now than the ideologues calling for, say, more austerity for and more unemployment in Greece!

How very strange it is for Schumpeter to be laying out his depressions-cause-structural-change-and-growth theory of business cycles at the very same moment that he is also laying out his entrepreneurs-disrupt-the-circular-flow-and-cause-structural-change-and-growth-theory of enterprise. It is, of course, the second that is correct: Growth comes from entrepreneurs pulling resources into the sectors, enterprises, products, and production methods of the future. It does not come from depressions pushing resources into unemployment. Indeed, as Keynes noted, times of depression and fear of future depression are powerful brakes halting Schumpeterian entrepreneurship: "If effective demand is deficient... the individual enterpriser... is operating with the odds loaded against him. The game of hazard which he plays is furnished with many zeros.... Hitherto the increment of the world���s wealth has fallen short of the aggregate of positive individual savings; and the difference has been made up by the losses of those whose courage and initiative have not been supplemented by exceptional skill or unusual good fortune. But if effective demand is adequate, average skill and average good fortune will be enough..."

How Schumpeter genuinely seems to have no clue at all that the business cycle is a feature of a monetary economy--how very badly indeed he needed to learn, and how he never did learn, what Nick Rowe and company teach today about the effects of monetary stringency on economic coordination.

And, finally, how absolutely bonkers liquidationism and austerianism remain...

Joseph Schumpeter (1934): _Depressions: What Can We Learn from Past Experience?: "The problems presented by periods of depression may be grouped as follows: First, removal of extra economic injuries to the economic mechanism: Mostly impossible on political grounds...

...Second, relief: Not only imperative on moral and social grounds, but also an important means to keep up the current of economic life and to steady demand, although no cure for fundamental cases.

Third, remedies: The chief difficulty of which lies in the fact that depressions are not simply evils, which we might attempt to suppress, but--perhaps undesirable--forms of something which has to be done, namely, adjustment to previous economic change. Most of what would be effective in remedying a depression would be equally effective in preventing this adjustment. This is especially true of inflation, which would, if pushed far enough, undoubtedly turn depression in to the sham prosperity so familiar from European postwar [i.e., World War I] experience, but which, if it be carried to that point, would, in the end, lead to a collapse worse than the one it was called in to remedy.

Fourth, reforms of institutions intended to remedy the situation but suggested by the moral and economic evils of both booms and depressions: The crucial point of these reforms lies in the coincidence of a political atmosphere exceptionally favorable, and an economic situation exceptionally unfavorable to their success. No doubt they will always be carried amidst enthusiastic clapping of hands. But they will also be stigmatized in the future by their tendency to prevent or retard recovery. This should not blind to us to any merits they may have, but it is a plain and undeniable fact.

The Atmosphere of Periods of Depression: We have seen that the course of events in all periods of depression presents a significant family likeness. So do the attitudes of the people. Defeat on the battlefield destroys the prestige of military rulers and their confidence in themselves; crises destroy whatever of both these things business leaders may enjoy. Their cry for help is the more damaging for them the more they disapproved of government interference before. For the time being, the majority of people grows out of humor with the economic system under which they live, and becomes inclined to favor what in some cases we call reaction and in others radicalism. In fact, it makes astonishingly little difference which way they more politically. The consequences are much the same in both cases....

The Upshot: There is on reason to despair--this is the first lesson to be derived from our story. Fundamentally the same thing has happened in the past, and it has--in the only two cases which are comparable to the present one--lasted just as long. We are more keenly alive now to human suffering, and we are dealing with the situation under political pressure by political methods, but substantially we are confronted only with problems which the world was confronted with before.

In all cases, not only the two which we have analyzed, recovery came of itself. There is certainly this much of truth in the talk about the recuperative powers of our industrial system. But this is not all: our analysis leads us to believe that recovery is sound only if it does com of itself. For any revival which is merely due to artificial stimulus leaves part of the work of depressions undone and adds, to an undigested remnant of maladjustment, new maladjustment of its own which has to be liquidated in turn, thus threatending business with another crisis ahead. Particularly, our story provides a presumption against remedial measures which work through money and credit. For the trouble is fundamentally not with money and credit, and policie of this class are particularly apt to keep up, and add to, maladjustment, and to produce additional trouble in the future...

#shouldread

Uncle Judea, Melanin, Genetics, and Educational Attainment...

Highly Recommended: Judea Pearl and Dana Mackenzie: The Book of Why: The New Science of Cause and Effect https://books.google.com/books?isbn=0465097618. And: Aha! So I am not as stupid as I am ugly after all!:

Sokrates: "Your intuition is exactly right: SNPs for (or chromosomally linked to) melanin would predict educational attainment, in a sample drawn from the current over-all American population. The R^2 just for them might not be 10%, but it would certainly be non-negligible...

...Indeed, I would be somewhat surprised melanin-linked SNPs wouldn't be predictive even in a sub-sample of just those categorized as "black". The same would be true, though I suspect to a lesser extent, for SNPs (linked to) curly hair. The more fundamental point is that social and cultural inheritance, together with endogamy, mean that that there are certainly SNPs which predict your class background and the cultural traditions you were exposed to. (If we haven't identified SNPs which distinguish Baptists from Congregationalists among current Americans, it's pretty certainly because we've just not looked for them.)

You would expect a non-trivial ability to predict educational attainment and cognitive function (bracketing, for now, the extent to which we can measure "cognitive function" independently of "educational attainment") from a GWAS even in a blank-slate world, where all differences in mental function were purely a result of learning and experience. (For the record, of course we don't live in a blank-slate world.) This is one of those situations where Uncle Judea would, correctly, tell us to draw the DAG, and doing so would show an un-blocked back-door path: (ego's genes) (ego's parents' environment) -> (ego's environment) -> (ego's IQ), which we don't really know how to deal with.

The new Nature Genetics paper doesn't, on first scan, show any awareness of this sort of issue at all...

DeLong: Am I profoundly stupid, or is Uncle Judea's framework of causal confounders���colliders���mediators a huge advance, perhaps not in helping those of you who think carefully do non-stupid statistics, but in helping those of us who do not think carefully do non-stupid statistics, and in providing a royal road to teaching people how to do not-stupid statistics?

Sokrates: "No, it really is that awesome!...

...There are other people who can claim a great deal of shared credit for that advance, especially in philosophy. But it really is that important, for all the reasons you give. I'd say it's helpful to those do think carefully, as well!

That said, Pearl's technical books are not easy to learn from.

I do think there's something to the expression of decision theory in terms of bets and money that isn't handled by just observing "well, that was the first technological context where we really needed to understand all this". The relevant analogy would be if we had formulated the laws of Newtonian physics in terms which only made sense for 17th century clockwork, so that before you could try to study, say, cloud formation or polymers that you had to pretend everything was really a rigid body.

The last time that a Republican voted for a live and poss...

The last time that a Republican voted for a live and possible deficit-reduction package���a combination of spending cuts and tax increases relative to baseline that might attract legislative majorities���was 1990. Since then Republicans have voted for spending cuts and spending increases. And they have voted for tax cuts for the rich. Deficit reduction? Nope. Alice Rivlin is in the position of the person who goes out in the night on December 31, 999 firmly expecting the Messiah, when nothing happens says "I must have miscounted: it will happen next year", and keeps it up. Well, it is now 1027. 28 such non-appearances, soon to be 29. And she still has firm faith that the Republican Budget Messiah will arrive next year, if not this one: Brendan Greeley: Goodbye to Sunday morning economics: "Whenever Alice Rivlin speaks in public it feels like a tent revival...

...We'd only get real deficit reduction if both parties work at it. Tell it Alice! Both parties! It was going to hurt, she said. Oh it will hurt, we sang at our tables, and we paid for that hurt with our sins! Washington is always in a Sunday-morning mood when Ms Rivlin speaks. She reminds us that we are fallen. We feel the cleansing heat of our own shame. We vow to redeem ourselves through our good works. We then step outside for coffee and networking. The problem with Sunday morning, both in church and in Washington, is the rest of the week: we promise to sin no more, then we go raise hell. Rivlin revivals don't ever make Washington better, but they do make Washington feel better. And so we're relieved that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a charismatic Democrat with an economics degree who is likely to become the next representative for New York's 14th District, is bringing modern monetary theory to Washington. We would not describe Alphaville as a modern monetarist publication, but we do admire the movement's honesty....

We find the modern monetarists appealing because they don't ever go to budget church. They do not sing at the Rivlin revivals. This doesn't make them sinners. It makes them honest. They're willing to examine the practical limits of government spending, rather than a theoretical ideal. And they're willing to describe fiscal policy as Washington actually pursues it...

#shouldread

Paul Krugman: Partisanship, Parasites, and Polarization: ...

Paul Krugman: Partisanship, Parasites, and Polarization: "Parasites are a huge force in the natural world.... A number... actually change their hosts��� behavior, in ways that benefit the parasites but damage and perhaps eventually kill their victims...

...Lately I���ve been wondering if that���s what���s happening to America. How much of our political sickness is the result of a parasitic infection? What I have in mind specifically is an infestation of direct-marketing scams that exploit and reinforce political partisanship, largely on the right, basically to sell merchandise.... What set me on this trail initially was learning that Ben Shapiro, the Young Conservative Intellectual du jour, is using his talk-show presence to market dietary supplements.... A lot of political action is driven by people trying to shape policy in a way that benefits them personally. But what the Shapiro/brain pills story drives home to me is that there���s another important factor in our current political scene: the use of political action as a marketing ploy, by people out to make a buck selling stuff that has little to do with politics per se. Rick Perlstein has already written the basic text....

Right-wing websites largely act as marketing centers for stuff like this:

Dear Reader, I���m going to tell you something, but you must promise to keep it quiet. You have to understand that the ���elite��� would not be at all happy with me if they knew what I was about to tell you. That���s why we have to tread carefully. You see, while most people are paying attention to the stock market, the banks, brokerages and big institutions have their money somewhere else . . . [in] what I call the hidden money mountain . . . All you have to know is the insider���s code (which I���ll tell you) and you could make an extra $6,000 every single month.

And some of the most influential voices on the right haven���t just sold advertising space to purveyors of snake oil, they���ve gotten directly into the snake-oil business themselves. Thus:

Glenn Beck in his heyday juiced up his viewers by telling them that Obama was going to unleash hyperinflation any day now; he personally cashed in by hawking overpriced gold coins.

Alex Jones makes a splash by claiming that school massacres are fake news, and the victims are really actors. But he makes his money by selling diet supplements.

Ben Shapiro writes critiques of liberal academics that conservatives consider erudite (remember Ezra Klein���s line about a stupid person���s idea of what a thoughtful person sounds like?), but makes his money the same way Alex Jones does.

Why should marketing scams be linked to political extremism? It���s all about affinity fraud: once you establish a persona that appeals to angry, aging white guys, you can sell them stuff that will supposedly protect their virility, their waistline, and their wealth. And at a grander level, isn���t that what Fox News is really about?... The Alex Joneses, Ben Shapiros, and Fox Newses of the world couldn���t profit from extremism unless there were some underlying predisposition of angry old white guys to listen to this stuff. But maybe the commercial exploitation of political anger is what has concentrated and weaponized that anger.... It���s really important to realize the extent to which peddling political snake oil, whether it���s about the economy, race, the effects of immigration, or whatever, is to an important extent a way to peddle actual snake oil...

#shouldread

Jacob Bastian and Katherine Michelmore: The Long-Term Imp...

Jacob Bastian and Katherine Michelmore: The Long-Term Impact of the Earned Income Tax Credit on Children���s Education and Employment Outcomes: "Using 4 decades of variation in the federal and state Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC)...

...we estimate the impact of exposure to EITC expansions in childhood on education and employment outcomes in adulthood. Reduced-form results suggest that an additional $1,000 in EITC exposure when a child is 13���18 years old increases the likelihood of completing high school (1.3%), completing college (4.2%), and being employed as a young adult (1.0%) and earnings by 2.2%. Our analysis reveals that the primary channel through which the EITC improves these outcomes is increases in pretax family earnings...."

#shouldread

Not to put the pressure on or anything, but I expect very...

Not to put the pressure on or anything, but I expect very good things from our Equitable Growth grant to: Matthew Staiger: Parental Resources And The Career Choices of Young Workers: "With a specific focus on the impact of parental resources on entrepreneurship and job mobility...

#shouldread

Monthly for Project Syndicate #projectsyndicate

Future:

Charles II Stuart the merry monarch
Understanding China Through the Lens of Indicative Planning Successes

 

2018:

Tweed Jackets and Natural Disasters
Four Lessons the Federal Reserve Ought to Have Learned https://www.icloud.com/pages/0FLGQ41ca426KPcCNwwYVyN9g https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/ahistorical-federal-reserve-ignores-four-lessons-by-j--bradford-delong-2018-08
America the Loser https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/america-the-loser-under-trump-by-j--bradford-delong-2018-07
America's Founders vs. Trump: The Federalist's Views on Democratic Representation and the Threat of Rapid Factionalim... https://www.icloud.com/keynote/0v_JijLOHVPj6VXoe2VCBKCvQ
The Destruction of the Republican Party: Donald Trump Might Make His Adopted Party Unelectable for Years to Come...
Crisis, Rinse, Repeat: Obvious Failures in the Response to the Great Recession Still Have Not Been Acknowledged...
Trump's Tax on America: Forthcoming Tariffs on Steel and Aluminum Imports Will Raise Costs Throughout the Economy...
Donald Trump Is Playing to Lose: Marvel at the U.S. President's Bizarre and Self-Defeating Approach to Politics and Policymaking...
Why Low Inflation Is No Surprise: Challenge Economists Who Abidingly Assume that Another Price Spiral Is Always Just Around the Corner...

 

2017:

America's Broken Political System: The Country's Problems Run far Deeper than the Republicans' Bad Tax Bill...
Keeping U.S. Policymaking Honest: Fearing that the Trump Administration Is Starting to Politicize Independent Policy Assessment...
Politics in the Way of Progress: Political Confidence Men and Craven Profiteers Blocking the Sustainable Development Goals...
Supply-Side Amnesia: The Congressional Republicans' Tax Plan to Increase the Deficit and Benefit the Rich...
The New Socialism of Fools: Four Root Causes of Resistance to Globalization since the Great Recession...
Public Spheres for the Age of Trump: Some of the Last Surviving Venues for Civil Democratic Discourse Are Not Carrying Their Weight...
The Truth Behind Today's U.S. Inflation Numbers: The Fed Needs to Adjust Its Economic Forecast and Pursue New Stimulus Policies...
Where U.S. Manufacturing Jobs Really Went: The Real Post-WWII Economic History Rebuts Today's Lazy and Misleading Conventional Wisdom...
Artificial Intelligence and Artificial Problems: Time to Challenge the Assumption that Technological Progress Necessarily Impoverishes Unskilled Workers...
Rethinking Productivity Growth: Have We Been Massively Underestimating the Extent of Economic Progress?...
Trading in Trump's Lies: NAFTA Is Not to Blame for Any Visible Decline in U.S. Manufacturing Employment...

 

2016:

The Age of Incompetence: Donald Trump May Be the Star of His Presidency, But He Is Unfit to Be the Boss...
Missing the Economic Big Picture: What Needs to Be Better Managed Is Not Globalization But Market Capitalism Itself...
Would Higher Interest Rates Boost U.S. Growth: The Fed Should Not Act Until Businesses Start Creating New Savings Vehicles and Investing the Proceeds...
Beating America's Health Care Monopolists: Industry Consolidation Is a Major Threat to Consumers' Wallets, and to ObamaCare...
The Economic Trend Is Our Friend: The Engine of Long-Run Growth Is Still Running, Despite Poor Recent Performance...
A Brief History of Inequality: The Complex Factors Underpinning 250 Years of Global Wealth Distribution...
Which Thinkers Will Define Our Future?: Give the Nod to John Maynard Keynes, Karl Polanyi, and Alexis de Tocqueville...
Uncertainty at the Fed: The World's Most Important Central Bank Is at Risk of Losing Its Credibility...
Rescue Helicopters for Stranded Economies: Central Banks Should Take Action When and Where Fiscal Authorities Will Not...
Debunking America's Populist Narrative: I Refuse to Blame Income Stagnation on Globalization and Trade...
Pragmatism or Perdition: America's Economic Problems Are Overwhelmingly Due to Four Decades of Government-by-Ideologue...
Economics in the Age of Abundance: The End of Scarcity Does Not Men the End of Economic Problems...
Piketty vs. Piketty: One of the Strongest Objections to Piketty's Words Is Made by Piketty's Deeds...

 

2015:

The Trouble with Interest Rates: Borrowing Costs Are too High, Not too Low...
The Tragedy of Ben Bernanke: Macroeconomic Lessons from the Former Fed Chair's New Memoir...
Sunlight on Tax Havens: Praise Gabriel Zucman's New Book on the High Cost of Hidden Wealth...
A Cautionary History of U.S. Monetary Tightening: The Last Four Tightening Episodes Reduced Employment and Output Far More than Anticipated...
Depression's Advocates: European Policymakers Appear Determined to Ignore the Lessons of the 1930s...
How Some Small Booms Can Cause Big Busts: Some Asset-Price Bubbles Are Much More Damaging than Others...
Putting economic Models in Their Place: We Need to Take Economists to Task for Making Bigger Claims for Their Theories than Their Theories Can Support...
An Even More Dismal Science: A Quarter-Century of Debate About the Business Cycle Has Left Us with Little Room for Optimism...
The Monetarist Mistake: The Power of Misguided Ideas Led to a Tepid Response to the Great Recession...
Making Do with More: Why Living Standards Stagnate in Societies Blessed with Unprecedented Abundance...
What Failed in 2008?: Why Policymakers Have Not Responded Appropriately to Their Economies' Post-Crisis Malaise...

 

2014:

Try Everything: A Simple Yet Radical Strategy for Global Economic Recovery...
Inequality and the Internet: Broadband Accessibility Might Help Offset Some of the Growing Gap in Income and Wealth...
American Wellbeing since 1979: Perhaps Much of Even the Relatively Small Gains for Poor U.S. Households since 1979 Should Be Discounted...
The Rise of the Robots: No, Peter Thiel, Robots Are Unlikely to Save Us from Any Threatening Low-Wage Future...
The Greater Depression: It Is Time to Start Calling What Is Happening in Europe and the U.S. by Its True Name...
The Internet's Next Act: We Need to Assess the ICT Revolution's Ongoing Impact on the Middle Class...
The World's Central Banker: The U.S. Will Face a Dangerous World Unless the Federal Reserve Fulfills Its Global Role...
Unjust Deserts: The "Meritocratic" Ideology Underlying the Rise in Inequality Ought to Have Run Its Course...
The Right's Piketty Problem: I Continue to Be Gobsmacked by the Poverty of Conservative Criticism of Capital in the Twenty-First Century...
Marx and the Mechanical Turk: Can We Determine Whether Capital Complements or Substitutes for Labor Now and in the Future?
Revisiting the Fed's Crisis: Reading the Fed's Meeting Transcripts from 2008 Tells Us About Appalling and Blinkered Official Mindsets...
Is America Turning Japanese?: Trend Economic Growth Can No Longer Be Neatly Disentangled from Cyclical Dynamics...

 

2013:

The Strange Case of American Inequality: Why Americans Fail to Clamor for Policies that Would Leave 90% of Them Better Off?...
The Long Short Run: The Intellectual History of the Coming Lost Growth Decades...
Greenspan Has Left the Building: On Alan Greenspan's The Map and the Territory...
The Taper and Its Shadow: QE, Interest Rates, and Systemic Risk...
Whose Central Bank?: The Fed Should Be the Steward of the Economy, Not the Servant of Large Commercial Banks...
America's Health Care Divide: Partisanship and the Health Care Debate in the United States...
Starving the Squid
Inequality on the Horizon of Need: The Staying Power of Economic Malaise...
Deploying Germany's Debt Capacity for European Recovery...
When Is Government Debt Risky?
Risks of Debt: The Real Flaw in Reinhart-Rogoff
Let It Bleed?

 

2012:

American Conservatism's Crisis of Ideas
Grand Mal Economics
Over the Fiscal Cliff We Go
America's Political Recession
Our Debt to Stalingrad
Stage Three for the Euro Crisis?
Democracy in Tea Party America
Hopeless Unemployment
The Perils of Prophecy
The Economic Costs of Fear
Re-Capturing the Friedmans: Milton and Rose Director Friedman's Factual Claims About the World Have Largely Crumbled...
The Shadow of Depression
The Usual Suspect
Neville Chamberlain Was Right

 

2011:

America's Financial Leviathan
The 70% Solution
The ECB's War Against Central Banking
A Free Lunch for America
Ben Bernanke's Dream World
America's Locust Years
Built to Bust
Economics in Crisis
The Anatomy of Slow Recovery
Pain without Purpose
Intelligent economic Design

 

2010:

A Time to Spend
The Retreat of Macroeconomic Policy
The Humiliation of Britain
Economics for Parrots
The Varieties of Unemployment
J.S. Mill vs. the ECB
Listening to Economic Arsonists
The Flight to Quality
Obama the Centrist
Taking Hope in the Long View
Is Fiscal Stimulus Pointless?
America's Employment Dilemma

 

2009:

The Fairness of Financial Rescue
Why Are Good Policies Bad Politics?
Slouching Towards Sanity
The Anti-History Boys
Bernanke's the One
Conservative Interventionism
Sympathy for Greenspan
The Hidden Purposes of High Finance
The Price of Inaction
Kick-Starting Employment
The Stimulus Ostriches
Four Ways Out

 

2008:

Depression Economics
The Road to Depression
Stocks and the Long Run
From Central Bank to Central Planner?
Is Inflation the Right Battle?
The Knife-Edge Economy
The Democrats Line in the Sand
Gambler's Ruin
John McCain and the Decline of America
The Keynesian Cure
The End of the Age of Friedman
In Marx's Shadow Again

 

2007:

Three Cures for Three Crises
Dollars and Depression
Uncertainty Shifts to China
Alan Greenspan on Trial
Is Liquidity Enough?
Fear of Finance
The Great Moderation
China's Blackstone Coup
America's Sleeping Watch Dog
The Secret Language of Central Bankers
Fearless Financial Markets
Inequality on the March

 

2006:

Saved by Taxes
Friedman Completed Keynes
Has Neoliberalism Failed Mexico?
Man's Fate, Man's Hope
The Box that Changed the World
The Tabloid Syndrome
The Myth of the "Ownership Society"
Bottom Dollar
Fiscal Apocalypse Now
Europe's Free Riders
The False Promise of Private Pensions

 

2005:

Semi-Rational Exuberance
Eyes Wide Shut on Global Warming
For Whom America's Bell Tools
America's Opposing Futures
Houses in the Air
Inviting the Avoidable
Europe's Neo-Liberal Challenge
Economists' New World Order
America's Interest Rate Puzzle
In Search of Global Demand
Fiscal Follies in America and Beyond
Bush's Crash-Tea Economics

 

2004:

America's Coming Social Democracy
Taming Voodoo Economics
Can High Oil Prices Be Good?
Doomsday for the Dollar?
The End of Want?
Welcome to the Era of Incompetence
The European Economic Model Lives
The Great Illusion
The Coming Age of Interest
America's Schizophrenic Economy
Protectionism Rides Again
The Richest Get Richer

 

2003:

The American Mirror
Robert Rubin Revisited
Bush's Pseudo-Conservative Revolution
The Weak Dollar's Impossible Strength
The Fragile Roots of Productivity Growth
Herbert Hoover and the Stability Pact
The New New Thing in Economics
The Roots of the Islamic World's Backwardness
Is the U.S. Economy Still in Recession?
The Final Defeat of Thomas Malthus?
Lula in the Shadow of Chavez
Atlas Slumps

 

2002:

The Ghosts of Economics Past
America's Second Gilded Age
Neoliberalism's Argentine Failure
The New German Problem
A Double-Dip Recession for the U.S.?
Down and Out in the United States?
Anatomy of a Crash
Is the "New Economy" a Fad?
New Rules for a New Economy




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