Month: May 2012
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Do Millionaires Vote with Their Feet?
Andrew Rosenthal points us to one of the most eye-poppingly specious arguments I’ve ever seen against high-earner taxes, from Scott Hodge at the Tax Foundation (my bold). …612,520 people renounced their New York State citizenship and moved to Florida between 2000 and 2010. They took with them nearly $20 billion in adjusted gross income, after adjusting…
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About Scaring that Confidence Fairy Away
Here’s how: From Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers at Reuters, hat tip to Matt Yglesias. Cross-posted at Angry Bear. Related posts: John Cochrane: I Would Never Dream of Suggesting that this Correlation Implies Causation! Mitt Romney in the Big Banks’ Pocket? Pas Possible Matthew Yglesias: Do Low Taxes Cause Inflation? “No, the shareholders don’t own the…
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Home Work, GDP, and Family Values: It’s Nice to be Validated
A while back I put together a rough calc estimating what our country’s “home-work” is worth as a share of GDP, based on the idea that such work is production, and that it has every bit as much value to our lives as work that we get paid for. By that estimate (based on the BLS…
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The Fed Faces the End Game — And Blinks?
If you’ve ever been involved in a legal contention, like a business or personal dispute or a contested divorce, you know that the whole game pivots, ultimately, on the potential end game: what would happen if the thing went to court — even if (even because) everyone involved knows that it never will. The fact that…
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Abraham Lincoln Sure Thought Majority Rule Was a Constitutional Principle
No mean constitutional thinker, he. 364,511 American soldiers died for that principle between 1860 and 1865, after the southern states refused to go along with Lincoln’s majority-rule election. 281,881 were wounded. He coulda just rolled over. But what’d he know? He was just one of those pointy headed coastal elitist intellectuals. Oh…wait… Related posts: Just…
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11 Percent of the Population Can Veto Anything
Read it here. No related posts.
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Why Does Y Equal Real GDP?
I hesitate to post this while Nick Rowe is on vacation, because he’s always so generous with his replies and explanations. Here’s hoping he gets back to this. But he does get me thinking. I’ve spent several days re-reading and pondering his Identity Economics post and (his) related others, which post begins [my brackets]: Here are…
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Inflation, Credibility, and Expectations: Again Some More
Paul Krugman rightly attacked the confidence fairy again yesterday — claiming that the unemployment of the 80s following Volcker’s tightening proves that Fed credibility doesn’t help — but I think he misfires this time. Here’s what I sed over there, with some tweaks: To be fair, Paul, isn’t the point here that in 1980 the Fed was…
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The Top Two Criteria for Expert Judgment: Curiosity and . . . Curiosity
First a recap: Philip Tetlock’s Expert Political Judgment was a groundbreaking look at whether political experts really are expert, as judged by their success at making predictions. His overall conclusion: they aren’t. But (lifted from a previous post): …among the experts, “foxes” — those who in Nicholas Kristof’s words are “are more cautious, more centrist, more likely to…
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U.S. Versus Europe: Who’s Winning Now?
Now that the OECD has updated their GDP data for 2010, I thought I should revisit the question I asked a few years ago: Who’s growing faster? The U.S. or Europe? The answer’s the same as it was then: it’s a dead heat. As I pointed out in that previous post, people love to cherry-pick…