Asymptosis: Always Approaching

Category: Politics

  • The Miasma School of Economics

    I’ve been reading Steven Johnson’s The Ghost Map, about the London cholera epidemic of 1854, and one passage reminded me exactly of today’s economics discipline. The sense of similarity was heightened because I also (instigated by Nick Rowe) happened to be reading Mankiw’s micro textbook section on the rising marginal cost of production — a notion that…

  • Marginal Rates and Economic Growth: They Go Up Together

    With Republicans frantically clinging to discredited ideology and digging in their heels on raising top marginal tax rates, I thought it would be worth revisiting a post from a couple of years ago, showing some excellent long-term evidence that higher marginal tax rates are not associated with slower growth. Quite the contrary, in fact. Here you…

  • Screw the Rich to Protect Super-Rich Campaign Contributors?

    This item raised my eyebrows when I saw it. Joshua Tucker at The Monkey Cage points out that the Republicans are proposing we do exactly that. The idea (NYT, emphasis mine): …tax the entire salary earned by those making more than a certain level — $400,000 or so — at the top rate of 35 percent…

  • Engineering a Permanent Democratic Majority

    Matthew Yglesias points the direction in his post: the Geographically smallest Electoral College map, which starts with the densest states and works down: If Democrats can bring Indiana, Virginia, North Carolina, and Florida (or even two or three of them) firmly into the Democratic camp, the game is over for the foreseeable future. Those states are…

  • Fixing Disaster Relief is Simple! Let Markets Work.

    I’ve often commented on how childish, really adolescent, the views of libertarians are. But it’s rare that I see such a stunning example. In a recent NYT “Room for Debate,” Russell Sobel of The Citadel gives us this: Fixing disaster relief is simple: greater use of decentralized markets, and focusing government on its proper role.…

  • Mitt Romney in the Big Banks’ Pocket? Pas Possible

    From OpenSecrets, hat tip to John Sides at The Monkey Cage: Cross-posted at Angry Bear. Related posts: The Myth of the “Independent” Voter The Macroeconomics of Chinese Kleptocracy Screw the Rich to Protect Super-Rich Campaign Contributors? John Galt, “Genocidal Prick” Do Savers “Take Resources out of Society”?

  • Deep and Long: Private Debt and Financial Recessions

    While he (uncharacteristically) doesn’t explain or deploy it terribly well, Paul Krugman points to some very excellent research on the relationship between private debt levels and the depth and duration of (especially financial-crisis-driven) recessions. The Schularick/Taylor Vox EU article is here. The Jorda/Schularick/Taylor paper is here (PDF). I think the work is excellent in large part because JS&T…

  • Adam Smith on Corporatism

    As a many-times business owner, I noted a couple of years back that in the ecosystem of publicly traded companies, there is nobody who thinks, acts, has incentives like, or is really anything like a real business owner. I’m pleased to find that Adam Smith agrees with me (emphasis mine): The trade of a joint stock…

  • Repeat After Me: Low Taxes (on Rich People) and Economic Growth Are Not Correlated

    Jared Bernstein tells us yet again what the data has been telling us forever (my bold): I agree with Chye-Ching Huang, who agrees with the Congressional Research Service, Len Burman, and me: over the long, historical record of special tax treatment for investment incomes and tax cuts to the top marginal tax rates, one simply doesn’t find significant correlations with…

  • Keynes: Pragmatist. Hayek: Utopian. Who Sez?

    …if you read about the tussle between the two great economists, you are struck by two things. First, how pragmatic a man John Maynard Keynes was. And second, how utopian the ideals of Friedrich Hayek are. This is odd, as each man attached himself to a polar opposite political philosophy: Keynes’s ideas were adopted by idealistic lefties,…

  • The Luddite Fallacy Fallacy

    I’ve spent a lot of time considering (here, here, here, and here) the notions of technological unemployment and the Luddite Fallacy: the idea that technologically driven productivity — machines — will replace, are replacing, human labor. I’d like to revisit that here. My basic conclusion: the Luddites were obviously wrong at the time. But they’re…

  • Laffer: Laughable As Always

    R Davis spends a whole lot of words (and numbers) explaining why Arthur Laffer’s latest WSJ editorial is false and ridiculous, but those who think about data — at all — really only need to read one line. Laffer’s key error — which a high-school statistics student could spot — is to: compare growth in…

  • No, Conservatives Aren’t Happier — Any More

    My small effort to ameliorate the disparity in Andrew Gelman’s headline: 1.5 million people were told that extreme conservatives are happier than political moderates. Approximately .0001 million Americans learned that the opposite is true. Andrew is commenting on Jay Livingston’s great takedown of David Arthur Brooks’ recent column asking “Who is happier about life — liberals or conservatives?”…

  • Red-Ink Republicans, Revisited and Reviled

    The post-New Deal Republican party has delivered endless strings of deficits and debt. That is their historic legacy to America, the bare fact on the ground that unfortunately requires endless repetition to impart the reality, and counter the tea-party fantasy of fiscally irresponsible Democrats. Also required is a catchy moniker that encapsulates that reality: Red-Ink Republicans…

  • Red-State Teat-Sucking Rendered Invisible. Conservatives Howl Tyranny.

    In response to this graphic in my reprised post from yesterday: Commenter rjs points us to this depressing Economist post — the government data source for this graphic has gone dark, part of the Obama administration’s cost-cutting measures. The real irony I discover, though, is to find right-wingers at The Heritage Foundation screaming about the Obama…

  • Are Conservatives Deluded About Their Happiness?

    Arthur C. Brooks of the American Enterprise Institute does the usual uninformed thing this week in his NYT op-ed, Conservatives Are Happier, and Extremists Are Happiest of All. He cites the well-known and long-standing research showing that conservatives report themselves to be happier than liberals. (I was not aware, though, that moderates are the least happy…

  • No, the Greeks Aren’t Lazy. The Germans Are.

    A lot of people out there seem to have the notion that Greece’s troubles are the result of laziness. That really doesn’t seem to be true. OECD: Average annual hours actually worked per worker 2000-2010 Germany 1473 1458 1445 1439 1442 1434 1430 1430 1426 1390 1419 Greece 2121 2121 2109 2103 2082 2086 2148…

  • Lying Liars: The Winner Is…

    Or: Chris Mooney Should Really Learn to Use Graphics More He’s got a great piece (“Reality Bites Republicans“) up over at The Nation on the rise of fact checkers, the perception that they’re bend-over-backward (or forward…) “even handed” in the face of blatant falsehood asymmetry, and long-term analysis of results from PolitiFact. But he also gives…

  • Methinks Jonathan Haidt Doth Protest Too Much: Southern Whites Edition

    Lots of excellent pushback against Jonathan Haidt’s crazy assertion that Republicans have become the party of working people. A great takedown by Larry Bartells, you can follow the rest from there. Haidt uses an awful lot of words, numbers, pictures, and general hand-waving to point out obscure the fact that white southern Democrats have gone Republican…

  • Reagan Staffer Bartlett Quotes Conservative Icon Wills, Eviscerating Republicans

    HT to Reagan staffer Bruce Bartlett on Facebook, pointing to this from conservative icon Gary Wills in the NYRB: To vote for a Republican means, now, is to vote for a plutocracy that depends for its support on anti-government forces like the tea party, Southern racists, religious fanatics, and war investors in the military-industrial complex. Hey, he said it,…

  • No Empire, Nation, or Dynasty Has Ever Collapsed Because its Working People Were Self-Indulgent and Lazy

    Or at least: In all the reading I’ve done, from Gibbon to Diamond to Acemoglu and Robinson and far beyond, I’ve never come across one. It’s not hard to find examples where you can at least reasonably attribute decline and fall to lazy, self-indulgent rich people. Of course, maybe this time is different. Related posts: Recessions…