Month: April 2013

I’d like to push back on Paul Krugman a bit, on this bit in particular: Yes, the government must pay its bills in the long run You hear this from him a lot. And I want to ask him: Paul, are you letting yourself be sucked into the very syndrome that you so bemoan and…

Revisiting a previous post, “Saving” ≠ “Saving Resources”*, wherein I question Scott Sumner’s notion that people who spend and consume more (save less) take resources “out of society.” Try this: John works for Debbie, and Debbie works for John. They each start out with $100 in dollar bills, $200 total. They pay each other in…

Or to be more precise, all currency is consensus currency. Units of exchange (dollar bills, great big rocks at the bottom of the ocean) can have value merely because everyone in a community agrees that they have value. That value need not be declared, defined, or enforced by some “fiat” authority with powers of (ultimately physical)…

The other day I dissed the analysis in Reinhart and Rogoff’s Growth in a Time of Debt as being on the level of a blog post from an amateur internet econocrank. I still hold that opinion. But I want to walk back on that, or at least clarify, and give lots of credit where due. Because they did make…

Or: Thinking About Periods and Lags No need to rehash this cock-up, except to point to the utterly definitive takedown by Arindrajit Dube over at Next New Deal (hat tip: Krugman), and to point out that the takedown might just take even if you’re looking at R&R’s original, skewed data. But a larger point: I frequently see econometrics…

I really like Hellestal’s comment and linguistic take on this whole business: I’m comfortable changing my language in order to communicate. I have very little patience for people who aren’t similarly capable of changing their definitions. This discussion is really about the words we use to describe different accounting constructs. Nick totally gets that as…

With all the chaff that’s been flying around (recently, and for years now) about saving and investment, dissaving, and lending/borrowing, I felt the need to go back to the numbers and see how they’ve played out over the decades in what we tend to call the “real” economy — domestic households and nonfinancial business. Click…

A while back Nick Rowe challenged amateur internet econocranks (my word, not Nick’s) like me to actually go read an intro econ textbook. (He was specifically targeting the author of Unlearning Economics — who I, at least, don’t consider to be an econocrank, he’s far better-versed than I am,  though Nick might.) I took him…

The title should actually be “How Dollar Bills Move,” but it’s not as alliterative. A fascinating item on the work of Dirk Brockmann, who’s used WheresGeorge.com to map the movement of dollar bills, and the boundaries over which they’re least likely to cross: I have no idea what to do with this, or whether it even has any…

Steve Randy Waldman and Scott Sumner (plus many others, linked from Steve’s post) wade in on notions of saving and investment. (I’m endlessly amazed that the best econothinkers on the web — add Nick Rowe, Andy Harless, David Beckworth, Josh Mason, and many others to the list — constantly feel the need to think, re-think,…

Matthew Yglesias riffs off my recent post, “Saving” ≠ “Saving Resources,” and there’s been quite a bit of commentary there, plus on Asymptosis and Angry Bear (plus a bit of twitter talk that I can’t figure out how to link to easily and usefully). There are a dozen things I want to discuss on the topic, but…