Asymptosis: Always Approaching

Month: June 2012

  • No, the Greeks Aren’t Lazy. The Germans Are.

    A lot of people out there seem to have the notion that Greece’s troubles are the result of laziness. That really doesn’t seem to be true. OECD: Average annual hours actually worked per worker 2000-2010 Germany 1473 1458 1445 1439 1442 1434 1430 1430 1426 1390 1419 Greece 2121 2121 2109 2103 2082 2086 2148…

  • Lying Liars: The Winner Is…

    Or: Chris Mooney Should Really Learn to Use Graphics More He’s got a great piece (“Reality Bites Republicans“) up over at The Nation on the rise of fact checkers, the perception that they’re bend-over-backward (or forward…) “even handed” in the face of blatant falsehood asymmetry, and long-term analysis of results from PolitiFact. But he also gives…

  • Should the Fed Buy Munis?

    Mike Konczal floats a very interesting idea emailed to him by Richard Clayton, the Research Director of Change To Win (my bold for quick scanning). under Section 14 b 1 the Fed has the authority to purchase any obligation of a state or local government of 6 months maturity or less. This provision seems clearly to permit a mass…

  • Methinks Jonathan Haidt Doth Protest Too Much: Southern Whites Edition

    Lots of excellent pushback against Jonathan Haidt’s crazy assertion that Republicans have become the party of working people. A great takedown by Larry Bartells, you can follow the rest from there. Haidt uses an awful lot of words, numbers, pictures, and general hand-waving to point out obscure the fact that white southern Democrats have gone Republican…

  • What if the Doctor Market Was Like the Lawyer Market?

    Andrew Oh-Willeke points us to this, on the job market for lawyers: Slightly more than half of the class of 2011 — 55 percent — found full-time, long-term jobs that require bar passage nine months after they graduated, according to employment figures released on June 18 by the American Bar Association. I couldn’t find a comparable figure…

  • Reagan Staffer Bartlett Quotes Conservative Icon Wills, Eviscerating Republicans

    HT to Reagan staffer Bruce Bartlett on Facebook, pointing to this from conservative icon Gary Wills in the NYRB: To vote for a Republican means, now, is to vote for a plutocracy that depends for its support on anti-government forces like the tea party, Southern racists, religious fanatics, and war investors in the military-industrial complex. Hey, he said it,…

  • No Empire, Nation, or Dynasty Has Ever Collapsed Because its Working People Were Self-Indulgent and Lazy

    Or at least: In all the reading I’ve done, from Gibbon to Diamond to Acemoglu and Robinson and far beyond, I’ve never come across one. It’s not hard to find examples where you can at least reasonably attribute decline and fall to lazy, self-indulgent rich people. Of course, maybe this time is different. Related posts: Recessions…

  • Why Equality Drives Entrepreneurship and Innovation

    Coming at this question from my typical perspective: a business owner facing a national economy. You run a mid-sized business selling high-quality furniture. You’ve developed a new chair that’s better than the other chairs on the market. (Think: the Herman Miller Aeron Chair.) Say you’re planning to sell it for $700. (You can’t sell it…

  • How the Fed Destroyed its Credibility

    The Fed’s credibility is obviously important. If people believe that they can and will do what they say they’re going to do — and that it will have the desired effect — they can affect the the real economy (at least short-term) by just making promises — Open Mouth Operations. (Though they must actually do…

  • Recessions Are Nature’s Way of Keeping the Little Guy Down

    Or: Yes, The Rich Really Are Different You’ve all probably seen the depressing reports from the newly issued 2010 edition of the Fed’s triennial Survey of Consumer Finance, in particular the 39% drop in median household net worth, ’07-’10. Here’s a picture (click for larger): The well-off have done fine. In the greatest economic downturn…

  • It’s Called “Governing”

    While approximately 23% of the American public and roughly half of the political elite is hell-bent on dismantling and destroying the government that our founders and our predecessors have bequeathed unto us, using methods and theories that bear an uncanny resemblance to medieval bloodletting, I think it’s worth remembering that tens of thousands of people…

  • An Open Letter to Robert Barro

    Noahpinion points us to — and goggles in amazement at — Robert Barro’s latest op-ed in the WSJ. Why This Slow Recovery Is Like No Recovery  This prompts me to republish an open letter to Professor Barro that I posted some years ago. (To which, not surprisingly, I never received a reply.) It speaks volumes of Robert Barro’s “scholarship”…

  • The Macroeconomics of Chinese Kleptocracy

    Damn, Krugman beat me to this yesterday. I thought I would be bringing in a fascinating piece from the fringes of the Australioblogosphere. Bronte Capital: The Macroeconomics of Chinese kleptocracy. My basic take is the same as Paul’s: I have no idea whether this John Hempton piece on China is at all right, but it’s a terrific read,…

  • Vanity, All Is Vanity. David Brooks Gets One Thing Right.

    Today (emphasis mine): Vast majorities of Americans don’t trust their institutions. That’s not mostly because our institutions perform much worse than they did in 1925 and 1955, when they were widely trusted. It’s mostly because more people are cynical and like to pretend that they are better than everything else around them. Vanity has more to…

  • Dems Need to Pay Attention to Monetary Policy!

    I’m not nearly the first to this party, but want to bring it up for my readers who may not be clued in to it. For the second year in a row, some of the best economics bloggers on the Web (this year: Matt Yglesias, Mike Konczal, Karl Smith, Lisa Donner), did a session at…

  • Turtles All the Way Down: Are Fed Promises “Actions”? How About Promises to Make Promises? Game Theory Edition

    The frequently brilliant Ashwin Parameswaran makes The Case Against Monetary Stimulus Via Asset Purchases, and Nick Rowe responds. Ashwin replies, analyzing “monetary policy as a threat strategy.” Nick’s view (in Ashwin’s words): …a credible threat will cause market expectations to adjust and negate the need for any actual intervention in markets by the central bank.…

  • The Myth of the “Independent” Voter

    John Sides at The Monkey Cage makes what seems to be an incredibly important point, at least for politico types. In the latest Pew report (PDF) that everyone’s nattering about, we see a big rise in “independent” voters over the last decade (to 38%). But: only 12% of respondents did not identify with or lean…

  • I Heart Sane Conservatives!

    In a recent post I spoke with astonishment and admiration of an article/post by Ron Unz in the May issue of The American Conservative (he’s the publisher) that laid out a realistic, fact-based, cogent, and coherent portrait of our current economic situation. (I also pointed out that he 1. couched the post in an odd and unnecessarily…

  • Eating the Seed Corn? Consumption in the American Economy Since 1929

    Following up on some work I did a while back (Kuznets Revisited: Investment in the American Economy Since 1929), I got curious about what consumption has looked like in America over the last 80 years. I’ll give you the results first, as a proportion of output, or GDP, followed by explanation and discussion. Click for…

  • Improper Concepts to Measure

    In the comments on my recent Home Work, GDP, and Family Values, which discusses a recent study (PDF) on the subject, Saturos points to this Arnold Kling post replying to a Timothy Taylor post summarizing that study. Saturos thinks Arnold’s post is “excellent.” I think otherwise. Arnold says “the value of household production” is an “improper concept to measure.” His reasoning: Should you measure…