Economics Roundtable

By Kathy G.

It’s ironic that this James Surowiecki piece about Toyota’s success came out this week, given the fact that the the latest financial report from Toyota (via Megan McArdle) shows a substantial decline in profits. The decline is being blamed on “a stronger yen and soaring ...

By Kathy G.

The results of this new study on pain assessment by Princeton’s Alan Krueger and SUNY Stony Brook’s Arthur Stone are for the most part not particularly surprising. As it turns out, economic inequality impacts practically every dimension of human existence; even physical pain is unequally shared. ...

Surfing over to Charles Dodgson’s site yesterday, I happened upon Elizabeth Warren’s lecture on the squeeze on the American middle class since the 1970s. Then you could bring up a family on one income; now you can’t. Then non-discretionary spending made up a smaller proportion of household spending; now, ...

I was pretty much stunned into silence by the proposal for a gasoline tax holiday put forward by John McCain and Hillary Clinton (not that it matters but I’m not clear which of them came up with it first – can anyone set me straight on this). I ...

Among the outcomes produced by a market economy, real wages are arguably the most important single variable for most people. With inflation rising around the world, and sensitive prices like those of food and petroleum going up a lot, most people’s living standards depend mainly on whether wages grow faster ...

Synopsis: yes.

I promised this post in comments to Chris’s on Blackburn’s myths below, where I took my life in my hands and disagreed with John. I think that actually, there probably is “a general skill called management which works in any and all domains”, and, ...

Riddle me this; how, in a world of competition and trade rules, does OPEC exist? I’ve been asking this question for years, and never gotten a proper answer. My faith in free trade may be shaken.

It reminds me of how, as a teenager, I spent several years asking ...

One for the junior-birdman Hayekians, Coasians and such like:

Consider a finite quantity of a consumption good G, which is to be divided into two allocations G1 and G2 for two different agents with utility functions over G described as U1(G1) and U2(G2).

What would be the minimum information that a central ...

Over at our joint I’ve been doing a fair bit of “this day seventy-five years ago” because of the anniversary of Roosevelt’s hundred days and, well, because. This one may hold some interest for an international readership:

On this day in 1933, British Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald delivered ...

This NYT article, The Decline of the $20 Wage”, on the vanishing blue-collar worker with a middle-class income is both depressing and…confusing. Adjusting the numbers for inflation is at least alluded to initially:

Leaving aside for a moment those who have lost their jobs, what of those who still ...