Asymptosis: Always Approaching

Category: Politics

  • Home-Work: Increase GDP by a Third?

    I wrote recently about the fact that non-remunerated work — anything that doesn’t involve a money transfer — isn’t included in GDP. So painting your mother’s house, fixing your car, or cooking dinner isn’t reflected in that key measure of our prosperity and well-being — even though that work quite clearly contributes greatly to our…

  • An Open Letter to Robert Barro

    Robert J. Barro is Paul M. Warburg Professor of Economics at Harvard University, a senior fellow of the Hoover Institution of Stanford University, and a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research. He is the third-ranked economist in the world, according to RePEc. Dear Professor Barro: I’m compelled to write after following your…

  • Republicans, In Lockstep, Oppose Largest Tax Cut in History

    Yeah, that’s the one: the one Obama just handed them. The compromise stimulus plan includes $282 billion in tax cuts over two years. According to the Wall Street Journal, Bush’s first two years of tax cuts amounted to $174 billion. A second batch in 2004 and 2005 cost $231. And those were thought to be…

  • Exports Ended the Great Depression: Yeah, Right

    A commenter tagged arogersb replied to one of my comments on Bruce Bartlett’s Forbes article (see my previous post), reiterating a familiar canard: True, the US recovered after WWII. But the reason of that recovery was not debt, it’s that the rest of the world factories were destroyed and had to import from the US.…

  • Reagan Supply Sider on The New Deal: “Deficits were too small, not too large.”

    Forget “centrism.” How about “sensible-ism”? Bruce Bartlett displays it in spades in his new Forbes article. Just as he did–to some extent–in his book Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy. Bartlett also wrote Reaganomics: Supply-Side Economics in Action–which is decidedly admiring of that belief system–so you know where he’s…

  • “Branding Happens”

    My ex business partner Steve has a new post asking why anybody uses glossy branding ads, when direct marketing is so much more cost-effective, and builds brand at the same time. The weird thing about us was that we cared about conversion (vs “branding”) , and despite dozens of attempts to make ads pay, the…

  • Women Rule! So Why Do They Tart Themselves Up?

    I've always wondered: why do women go in for elaborate clothing, makeup, and all those other things that (along with certain innate characteristics) make them so alluring to us males, while men dress relatively drably? It's not universal, of course, but it's the rule throughout much of the world. Among pre-agricultural peoples, primates, almost every…

  • Tyler Cowen: $10 Trillion in Stimulus Would Have No Effect

    I heard him on an NPR show last night, and was pulling my hair out with frustration. I admit that was partly because of comments by Cato’s Chris Edwards, who acts as if Keynesians don’t believe in monetary policy, calling them “childish.” When in fact it’s fundamentalist monetarists (read: supply-siders) who refuse to believe in…

  • We Need to Spur Business Investment. Yeah, Right.

    Comes before the court: Floyd Norris to point out that the heady dividends delivered by corporations 2004-2008 were in many cases not profits, but recycled loans. They borrowed the money, then paid it out to shareholders. Every penny in profits ($2.4 trillion) went out in dividends ($.9 trillion) and stock buybacks ($1.7 trillion), plus another…

  • The Massive Missing Link in GDP: Home-Work

    I’ve spilled a lot of electronic ink over the last few years arguing about what causes GDP growth (especially in developed countries like the U.S.), tacitly accepting that GDP per capita was a reasonably good proxy for prosperity and well-being. And it is–reasonably. It has the advantage of being widely and fairly consistently measured throughout…

  • Depression Lessons: How Much Fiscal Stimulus?

    There's lots of talk these days on upcoming fiscal stimulus–how much it should be and how it should be delivered. The NYT Economix blog offers recommendations from several economists, assuming a $500-billion package. Here's one that Greg Mankiw likes. When it comes to the size of the stimulus–and as Krugman argues quite cogently, in this…

  • Medicare: Government Does It Right

    I recently had occasion to go through two years of my 84-year-old mom's medical and insurance statements, to be sure that everything was kosher and that insurers were, in fact, paying all the bills they were supposed to be paying. You've undoubtedly attempted similar, so you can imagine that it was a daunting task–trying to…

  • Gates Saying All the Right Things

    I first read Robert Gates’ book several years ago, and re-read chunks of it last month. He’s a seriously sensible guy. (He even managed to come through Reaganville/Iran-Contraland with his integrity mostly intact.) I’ve been touting him for SecDef for more than a year–ever since he started clamoring for more money and resources at State.…

  • Why Prosperity Requires a Welfare State

    I’ve been spending a lot of time lately pondering James Livingston’s insights on how modern, high-productivity, post-industrial economies work, as expressed in two of his posts which I link to and encapsulate here. What finally closed the loop for me was re-reading Ray Kurzweil and others on past trends, and what the future holds: exponential…

  • Investing: Government Knows Better

    I know: that headline is hate speech. But the fact is that it’s sometimes true. Take education. Here’s the kind of reliable payoffs we get from investing there: And this doesn’t even count the long-term aid to business that education spending provides. Remember: few businesses are seriously constrained by a lack of investment capital (only…

  • Tyler Cowen Ignores the Elephant

    Tyler Cowen’s Sunday NYT discussion of The New Deal is getting all sorts of play in the econoblogosphere–pro and con. What’s not getting much discussion (except here) is the elephant that Tyler rather inexplicably fails to even mention: massive government (deficit) spending during the war. (It’s not the war, stupid, it’s the spending.) The consensus…

  • Do Wealthy Investors Create Growth and Prosperity? Not So Much

    Here’s the central tenet of supply-side/trickle-down/voodoo Reaganomics: If rich people get (and keep) more money, they will invest it and promote economic growth, so everyone will prosper. That would (perhaps) be true if a shortage of investment were an important constraint on businesses and on economic growth. But according to the people who run those…

  • Obama Deploys Radical Linguistic Coherence Strategy

    I don't usually offer up whole posts from others, but Andy Borowitz pones this one. I can't improve on it. Obama’s Use of Complete Sentences Stirs ControversyStunning Break with Last Eight Years In the first two weeks since the election, President-elect Barack Obama has broken with a tradition established over the past eight years through…

  • Who Says “Soft Power” Doesn’t Matter?

    World leaders won't even shake Bush's hand: Related posts: “Cheering Germans Will Not Send More Troops to Afghanistan” Weimar, Zimbabwe, Here We Come Economies Need a Gardener’s Invisible Hand Joe Thinks Obama’s an Appeaser, and FDR Caused The Great Depression McCain’s Steel Ceiling: Who Loves Ya, Baby?

  • “Springboard,” Not Safety Net

    I wrote an email to economist Alan Blinder at Princeton last week (which he was kind enough to respond to), in response to his NYT piece addressing our current…issues. “social safety net”…America’s is in tatters…we need both repairs and a new metaphor. Lyndon B. Johnson had it right when he called upon the government to…

  • Kristol’s Conservative Economic Cluelessness

    Now that he’s finished his series of columns giving sage political advice to John McCain (hey John, how’d that Palin pick work out for you?), Bill Kristol thinks he has some good ideas for a Republican party that is wondering whether it has any apparent reason for  continued existence. To begin with, Republicans should: …develop…