Asymptosis: Always Approaching

Author: Asymptosis

  • Lefty – Libertarian Cage Fight! Get Out the Popcorn…

    Matt Bruenig and Demos have thrown down the gauntlet against libertarian ideology. Trevor Burrus at Cato has picked it up. Should be worth tuning in. Matt pulls no punches. He’s emerged in the last year as one of the mediasphere’s most convincing voices for progressive ideas and policies, based (IMO) on air-tight arguments and thinking, backed by solid, well-presented facts and…

  • Contra Jared Bernstein: Stagnation, Spending, and The Velocity of Wealth — Five Graphs

    I’ve said many times: every economic assertion should be preceded by the words “by this measure.” For big economic questions, you need to look at lots of different measures, lots of different way, to get a feel for what’s going on. This has come home to me as I’ve considered Jared Bernstein’s ongoing takedown of…

  • The One Reason Apple Hasn’t Solved TV’s Cables and Remotes Problem

    How many remote controls do you have for your TV? Do you care to describe the tangle of cables and wires connecting your various components? If you’re like almost everyone I know, the answers are “at least three, probably five” and “No!” Have you had a housesitter recently? How long did it take for you to…

  • Think Debt-Funded Stock-Buybacks are Pernicious? Here’s Why You’re Right

    I’ve ranted about this phenomenon for a long time: Do Businesses Borrow to Invest in Productive Assets? Quoting JW Mason: “the marginal dollar borrowed by a nonfinancial business in this period was simply handed on to shareholders, without funding any productive expenditure at all.” We Need to Spur Business Investment. Yeah, Right. Quoting Floyd Norris:…

  • Sense on Stilts: Eight Graphs Showing a Quarter-Century of Wealth Inequality and Age Inequality

    Scott Sumner made a very important point a while back (and repeatedly since) in a post wherein he makes a bunch of other (IMO) not very good points: Income and wealth inequality data: Nonsense on stilts His crucial (and I think true) point, in my words: you can’t think coherently about inequality — especially wealth inequality — if…

  • Why the Rich Hate Inflation: Because They’re Creditors?

    Paul Krugman and assorted others have been puzzling at this question recently, one that I’ve been grinding an axe about for some years. For the first time, I think, Krugman’s highlighted the explanation that I keep going on about: Inflation helps debtors and hurts creditors, deflation does the reverse. And the wealthy are much more likely than…

  • A Quarter Century of American Prosperity: Four Graphs

    If you equate wealth and prosperity (not a crazy equation), then one of the best measures of a country’s prosperity is median household net worth. It arguably says a lot more about prosperity than various income measures. It tells you how the typical household (50% have more, 50% have less) is doing. If lots of…

  • A Definition of Money Is Not Sufficient, But it Is Necessary to Understand Economies

    Paul Krugman takes aim today at me (though he doesn’t know me from shinola), and others of my ilk who are at least somewhat obsessed with coming to a coherent definition of “money.” …people who spend too much time thinking about money in general — specifically, on trying to decode money’s true meaning and find the…

  • How We Reduce Poverty, and How “The Market” Doesn’t

    Matt Bruenig gives us a great breakdown of what poverty would look like if we relied on the market to solve it (as we did almost exclusively for thousands of years before the emergence of enlightened modern welfare states over the last two centuries). The poverty rate among the elderly would be > 45%. (Old…

  • The Reagan Revolution, In One Graph

    Years of >5% Growth: Pre-Reagan? 15 Post-Reagan? 5 Post-80s-recession-recovery? 2 Cross-posted at Angry Bear. Related posts: Repeat After Me: Low Taxes (on Rich People) and Economic Growth Are Not Correlated Now (Also) Blogging at Angry Bear You Gotta Give Reagan Credit David Beckworth Scott Sumner talks very good sense sometimes Marginal Rates and Economic Growth:…

  • Policy Prefs: I’m Right at the Peak of America’s Bell Curve. Where Are You?

    The idea of democracy is to give the people what they want, right? Ezra Klein points us to a great study by Ray LaRaja and Brian Schnaffer examining policy preferences by political donors (5% of the population) vs. non-donors (95%). Here’s my rendition of the results: Whose preferences would you say are embodied in our current government?…

  • The New Synthesis? Market Monetarists Meet New (and Post?) Keynesians on Helicopter Drops

    A a year or so back I highlighted David Beckworth’s great post on Helicopter Drops. And the world’s best econoblogger, Steve Randy Waldman, did as well. (A “fantastic post,” he said.) I’ve been pinging ever since to see a response to that post from Market Monetarist opinion-leader Scott Sumner. (AS SRW said, what we’d gotten from him…

  • Nassim Taleb: Two Myths About Rivalry, Scarcity, Competition, and Cooperation

    I’m delighted to find that someone with the necessary statistical chops has answered a question I’ve been asking for a while: Have any of the 130+ evolution scientists who’ve savaged Wilson and Nowak’s Eusociality paper (and Wilson’s Social Conquest of Earth) gone deep into the maths of their model (laid out in their technical appendix)? I check…

  • The Pernicious Prison of the Price Theory Paradigm

    Steve Randy Waldman has utterly pre-empted the need for this post, cut to the core of the thing, in the opening line of his latest (collect the whole series!): When economics tried to put itself on a scientific basis by recasting utility in strictly ordinal terms, it threatened to perfect itself to uselessness.  But I’ll try…

  • The Five Best Nonfiction Books

    Okay fine, not the best. (Click bait!) But for me, the most important — the five books that, more than any others, taught me how to think about the world. A friend in my “classics” book group asked me for nonfiction book recommendations. Here’s what I wrote: The NF books that wow me, get me…

  • Wealth Is Not Capital: The Brilliant Seth Ackerman Explains It All 4 U

    I’m stunned by how good the new Jacobin piece by Seth Ackerman is: “Piketty’s Fair-Weather Friends.” It gives what I find to be the best understanding so far of the whole Piketty “think space.” It’s so good that I can’t encapsulate it, so I’ll just share some of the passages I’m most taken with, with my…

  • Has Tyler Cowen Updated His Priors on Wealth Concentration and Inequality?

    Noah Smith has documented the “anti-Piketty crusade” by Tyler Cowen, Chairman and General Director of the Koch-brothers-funded Mercatus Center. (The post seems to have gone missing from Noah’s site [pourquoi?]; here’s Google’s cached version.) The latest from Cowen is here, joining in the right-wing chorus desperately trying to debunk the long and widely documented increase in wealth inequality (documented…

  • We Have No Idea What Our Capital is Worth

    That headline makes quite a statement. But it’s true. The stock of so-called “financial capital,” or wealth — all the financial assets out there, which are ultimately claims on real capital — represents only the most tenuous long-term approximation of what our real capital is worth. Certainly true: the stock (total dollar value) of “financial capital” goes up…

  • More on Money, Currency-ness, Wealth, and Spending

    Arthur over at New Arthurian Economics has posted a much-appreciated though decidedly negative reply to my recent post on the nature of money and financial assets. He and I have had very similar thinking over the years (and he has provided me, at least, with some Aha! moments), so I’d much like to convince him to…

  • Answering Brad DeLong’s “Deep Question”: Productivity vs. Power

    As a naive young noodler on economic topics I always wondered: Why are players in the financial industry — which produces very few real, human, consumable goods and services that people value in their lives — so well-paid? I figured it out pretty quickly: it’s because they are able to control who gets that real…

  • (Modern) Monetarist Thoughts on Wealth and Spending: Volume or Velocity?

    I’ve bruited the notion in the past that “money” should be technically defined, as a term of art, as “the exchange value embodied in financial assets.” In this definition, counterintuitively relative to the vernacular, dollar bills aren’t money. They’re embodiments of money, as are checking-account balances, stocks, bonds, etc. etc. Money and currency aren’t the…