Month: September 2012
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57% of Leading Economists are Not Worried About an Inflationary Wage/Price Spiral
8% are. 23% are uncertain or have no opinion. I really like this IGM panel (check out the roster — pretty damned impressive, or at least credentialed), but I wish they didn’t post such wishy-washy, softball questions. I post this one because it’s not. The one I’d really like them to ask: A modern, prosperous…
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The Money Confusion
The always-brilliant J. W. Mason’s response to what in my opinion is a quite befuddled Mike Beggs review in Jacobin of David Graeber’s Debt: The First Five Thousand Years prompts me to tackle a subject that I’ve been worrying at for a long time: Money. I’ve been worrying at it despite (or because of) endless reading spanning…
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Repeat After Me: Low Taxes (on Rich People) and Economic Growth Are Not Correlated
Jared Bernstein tells us yet again what the data has been telling us forever (my bold): I agree with Chye-Ching Huang, who agrees with the Congressional Research Service, Len Burman, and me: over the long, historical record of special tax treatment for investment incomes and tax cuts to the top marginal tax rates, one simply doesn’t find significant correlations with…
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Keynes: Pragmatist. Hayek: Utopian. Who Sez?
…if you read about the tussle between the two great economists, you are struck by two things. First, how pragmatic a man John Maynard Keynes was. And second, how utopian the ideals of Friedrich Hayek are. This is odd, as each man attached himself to a polar opposite political philosophy: Keynes’s ideas were adopted by idealistic lefties,…