Economics Roundtable
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.
November Payroll Employment
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.
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Cafe Hayek
Steve Horwitz – influenced, methinks, by my former student Adam Gurri – explains why pedestrian economics (here, alas, peddled by Paul Krugman) is mistaken to measure the contribution of entrepreneurs by how many workers they directly employ.
… is from page 119 of the 1978 edition of David Friedman‘s 1973 The Machinery of Freedom:
Part of freedom is the right of each of us to go to hell in his own fashion.
Here’s a letter to Washington, DC’s, WTOP Radio:
During today’s 11am hour you interviewed a Nevada GOP official who listed “strong enforcement of drug laws” as a “family value.”
His claim is questionable. Consider this observation by Pepperdine University Professor James Q. Wilson, a noted conservative and explicit proponent of the ‘war ...
In today’s European Wall Street Journal, Arnold Kling eloquently and concisely explains his idea of “PSST” – patterns of sustainable specialization and trade – and highlights how an understanding of the economy based upon PSST differs fundamentally from an understanding based on Keynesianism. I encourage you to read the ...
… is from page 61 of Frank Trentmann’s important 2008 book Free Trade Nation – a book that I thank Walter Grinder for bringing to my attention. In the section of the book from which the following quotation is taken, Trentmann is discussing Joseph Chamberlain’s “Tariff Reform” – an ...
… is from pages 191-192 of Steven Landsburg’s 2009 book The Big Questions:
Your kids look to you for guidance, while your congressman looks to you only for votes. So, quite sensibly, you think a lot harder and more clearly about what you’ll tolerate from your kids than what you’ll ...
Dean Baker comments on British austerity:
We have thousands of people in Washington who seem convinced that if the government would just stop spending money and lay off more employees then the private sector would respond with increased output and hiring.
While this might seem implausible on its face (what business ...
Congressional Quarterly reports (unfortunately gated) that several members of Congress – from both parties – seek to raise tariffs on Americans who buy foreign goods that (allegedly) are subsidized by foreign governments – with the Chinese government, of course, being singled out as a culprit apparently guilty of special ...
… is from page 19 of Peter Bauer’s and Alan Walter’s 1975 article – published in the April 1975 issue of the Journal of Law & Economics – entitled “The State of Economics“:
The prestige of econometrics has probably contributed to the widespread tendency to forget that in social study ...
Stuart Anderson sensibly proposes mandatory national-service for New York Times columnists. (Why is it that so many people, upon noticing – or imagining that they notice – a “social” problem, immediately jump to the conclusion that deploying government-directed force is the best way to “solve” that problem? Such an ...