Economics Roundtable
NOTICE 4/30/18
The Economics Roundtable is back. The technical problem that has limited the set of blogs has been resolved. The RSS feed is, however, still not working.
Flushing caches will likely cause some old posts to show up for a day or two.
Employment as a Percentage of Population
The graph below shows employment as a fraction of population for people over 16 years old.
Click on the image to get a bigger version.
March 2017 Payroll Employment
Payroll employment has not grown impressively since 2000. Some baby-boomers retired, but that does not totally account for this graph.
Click on the image to get a bigger version.
May 2014 Payroll Employment
After 76 months, we finally got back to the prerecession level of payroll employment.
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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.
Crooked Timber
"Out of the CROOKED TIMBER of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.”
I’ve been waiting for this paper to drop, ever since Suresh told me about it last year. It’s groundbreaking. What it does is to take Steve Teles’ qualitative work on the conservative legal movement, and then ask a simple question: if we start with the qualitative evidence about the ...
The publication date for my new book, Economics in Two Lessons, is set for May 2019. Until then, I’m putting extracts up on a Facebook page I’ve set up. Here’s the first one, part of the Introduction.
Nearly seven years after I started, I’ve finally submitted the manuscript of Economics in Two Lessons to Princeton University Press. There’s still a lot of work to be done in turning it into a published book, and some changes are still needed, but this is as close to a milestone ...
It’s obvious enough by now that support for Trumpism in the US and elsewhere is motivated primarily by racial and cultural animus, and not (or at least not in any direct way) by economic concerns. Still, to the extent that Trumpism has any economic policy content it’s the idea that ...
… least for me. Princeton University Press has agreed to publish my book, Economics in Two Lessons: Why Markets Work and Why they can Fail so Badly. I’ve been working on it for seven years, but it’s finally done. It should be published in the first half of 2019.
Stay tuned ...
Nearly seven years after I started work, here’s the final draft chapter from my book-in-progress, Economics in Two Lessons. Thanks to everyone who commented on the first 15 chapters and encouraged me in the project as a whole.
I’ve had quite a few amusing snarks on Twitter to the effect that ...
My long-running book-in-progress, Economics in Two Lessons is nearly done. Thanks to everyone who commented on the first 14 chapters.
Here’s a draft of Chapter 15: Monopoly and the Mixed Economy. Only one more chapter to come after this
Comments, criticism and praise are welcome.
Earlier draft chapters are available. These ...
My long-running book-in-progress, Economics in Two Lessons is nearly done. I have a nearly complete manuscript, and am hoping for news from the publisher soon. Thanks to everyone who commented on the first 13 chapters.
Here’s a draft of Chapter 14: Policy for full employment. Two more chapters to ...
Thanks to everyone who commented on the first twelve chapters of my book-in-progress, Economics in Two Lessons.
Here’s a draft of Chapter 13 on Redistribution
Comments, criticism and praise are welcome.
Earlier draft chapters are available. These aren’t final versions, as I am now editing the entire manuscript, but you can read ...
For as long as I can remember, the philosopher’s stock example of a proposition that is morally controversial has been “torturing babies is wrong”. Yet it turns out that torturing babies, or at least toddlers, is US government policy, where that policy involves separating them from their parents, leaving them ...