Month: September 2013
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Econobloggers: Does Big Government Help or Hurt Growth? Or Neither?
Tim Kane was nice enough to include my question in this year’s Hudson Survey of Leading Economics Bloggers (PDF). Here’s the question and the results: Judging based on post-war economic data, how do prosperous, high-GDP/capita countries compare with one another? Countries with larger government sectors have _____ growth rates compared to countries with smaller government sectors. As a group,…
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More on the Labor Force Surge and 70s Stagflation
There’s great discussion out there on this topic, see Steve Randy Waldman’s links list here. Karl Smith gives us this graph and asks: I mean, honestly, would you look at the graph above and conclude that during the 1970s the economy dangerously overheated. I’d like to offer a perhaps more useful (though more complicated) look.…
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Did the Baby Boom Labor Force Surge Cause The Great Inflation?
Steve Randy Waldman delivers another Aha! post (and a followup reply to Scott Sumner) pointing out a huge driver of the 1970s Great Inflation — the rise in the labor force: Between the mid 60s and the mid 70s, the labor force grew by 30%.* Steve, emphasis mine: The root cause of the high-misery-index 1970s was…
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Sumner: Has CPI Been Wildly Overstating Inflation?
Scott Sumner makes a very good point (though my interest here is somewhat peripheral to the main thrust of his post): Government price indices don’t measure the prices that are of macroeconomic interest. For instance in the 6 years after the housing bubble peaked the US, BLS data shows housing prices rising by about 10%, while Case-Shiller…
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Specifying “Demand”: Nick Rowe Meets Steve Keen on His Own Ground
You might well ask: “Whaddaya mean by ‘his,’ buster?” Nick does a full-faith effort here (including the comments) to characterize Steve Keen’s position (aggregate demand = GDP + change in debt), using Nick’s preferred language and mental modeling. It’s a darned good effort, but I think it’s crippled (as is Steve’s construct) by a conceptual failing…