Economics Roundtable
Calculated Risk
Read the Bill McBride interview.
Jobs
The best summary of the state of our economy is the graph (below) of employment as a fraction of population for people over 16 years old. The decrease is large, but the most troubling feature of the graph is the flat trend .
Click on the image to get a bigger version.
June Payroll Employment
The slowndown in employment growth over the past few months is starting to become more apparent in the graph below.
Click on the image to get a bigger version.
Focus on the Problem
U.S. payroll employment peaked at 132.5 million jobs in February 2001. For April 2012, U.S. payroll employment had reached 133.0 million jobs, marking the third month in a row above the February 2001 level.
Click on the image to get a bigger version.
Graph-of-the-Year Candidates
Donald Marron likes European interest rates. Click on the image to get a bigger version. Can you find three distinct subperiods?
Brad DeLong favors the U.S. gdp gap.
Finally, it's hard to argue against the payroll employment graph below (straight from FRED) and the comparison across recessions (courtesy of Calculated Risk).
Looking Up At 2001
In February 2001, U.S. payroll employment peaked at 132.5 million. The November 2011 figure of 131.7 million still falls 800,000 jobs short of the earlier peak.
Click on the chart for a larger version.
Remember M1?
Money Supply M1 growth is now over 20% per year over a 12 month lag. M1 growth has touched 20% before, but not with excess reserves of $1.6 trillion. Where is M1 headed?
Click on the chart for a larger version.
EconModel
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The Austrian Economists
|Peter Boettke|
Wolfgang Kasper has a new article up at the Edward Elgar blog dealing with the failed policies of the Eurozone. The teaser for the article states: "The Eurozone is in crisis, and only bold reforms can tackle the root causes. In the following article, Wolfgang Kasper explains ...
|Peter Boettke|
My review of Angus Burgin's The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free Markets Since the Depression (Harvard, 2012) has been published at the Library of Law & Liberty.
Also, see my paper with Chris Coyne and Abby Hall that was just published in the University of Oregon ...
|Peter Boettke|
That quote, which I believe comes from Herbert Spencer, was often stated in my classes with Professor James Buchanan. It is not intended as a knock, but as a call for continuous effort to communicate clearly the core points of your position.
In this spirit, students and scholars ...
|Peter Boettke|
Starting with Adam Smith, Tyler and Alex are now tackling the topic of the great economists. I have known Tyler Cowen for close to 30 years and his knowledge of the history of economic thought has always been one of the most impressive of anyone ...
We argue that Machlup's (1955) interpretation of Mises’s epistemology is at least, if not more, plausible than Rothbard's (1957). The implications of Machlup’s interpretation of Mises and Austrian epistemology affect Austrians, non-Austrians and how they relate to each other. Machlup’s interpretation shows that Austrian’s epistemology is well grounded ...
Peter T. Leeson
I’m grateful to Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson for their most recent post in our exchange. In it they pose several important questions, two of which in particular go to the heart of our disagreement about the reason for pirate democracy and the efficiency of ...
Peter T. Leeson
On WhyNationsFail.com, Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson provide a fascinating discussion of pirate democracy in which they were kind enough to discuss my work on the subject. As they point out, I characterize pirate democracy as an efficient institutional response to a principal-agent problem. Pirates were worried that ...
|Peter Boettke|
The annual meeting of the Association of Private Enterprise Education begins tonight. I will try to live blog from the meetings if I can.
Here is a photo sent to me by my teaching and research assistant, collaborator and co-author, and outstanding young economist --