Asymptosis: Always Approaching

Asymptosis: always approaching

  • About Scaring that Confidence Fairy Away

    Here’s how: From Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers at Reuters, hat tip to Matt Yglesias. Cross-posted at Angry Bear. Related posts: John Cochrane: I Would Never Dream of Suggesting that this Correlation Implies Causation! Mitt Romney in the Big Banks’ Pocket? Pas Possible Matthew Yglesias: Do Low Taxes Cause Inflation? “No, the shareholders don’t own the…

  • Home Work, GDP, and Family Values: It’s Nice to be Validated

    A while back I put together a rough calc estimating what our country’s “home-work” is worth as a share of GDP, based on the idea that such work is production, and that it has every bit as much value to our lives as work that we get paid for. By that estimate (based on the BLS…

  • The Fed Faces the End Game — And Blinks?

    If you’ve ever been involved in a legal contention, like a business or personal dispute or a contested divorce, you know that the whole game pivots, ultimately, on the potential end game: what would happen if the thing went to court — even if (even because) everyone involved knows that it never will. The fact that…

  • Abraham Lincoln Sure Thought Majority Rule Was a Constitutional Principle

    No mean constitutional thinker, he. 364,511 American soldiers died for that principle between 1860 and 1865, after the southern states refused to go along with Lincoln’s majority-rule election. 281,881 were wounded. He coulda just rolled over. But what’d he know? He was just one of those pointy headed coastal elitist intellectuals. Oh…wait… Related posts: Just…

  • 11 Percent of the Population Can Veto Anything

    Read it here. No related posts.

  • Why Does Y Equal Real GDP?

    I hesitate to post this while Nick Rowe is on vacation, because he’s always so generous with his replies and explanations. Here’s hoping he gets back to this. But he does get me thinking. I’ve spent several days re-reading and pondering his Identity Economics post and (his) related others, which post begins [my brackets]: Here are…

  • Inflation, Credibility, and Expectations: Again Some More

    Paul Krugman rightly attacked the confidence fairy again yesterday — claiming that the unemployment of the 80s following Volcker’s tightening proves that Fed credibility doesn’t help — but I think he misfires this time. Here’s what I sed over there, with some tweaks: To be fair, Paul, isn’t the point here that in 1980 the Fed was…

  • The Top Two Criteria for Expert Judgment: Curiosity and . . . Curiosity

    First a recap: Philip Tetlock’s Expert Political Judgment was a groundbreaking look at whether political experts really are expert, as judged by their success at making predictions. His overall conclusion: they aren’t. But (lifted from a previous post): …among the experts, “foxes” — those who in Nicholas Kristof’s words are “are more cautious, more centrist, more likely to…

  • U.S. Versus Europe: Who’s Winning Now?

    Now that the OECD has updated their GDP data for 2010, I thought I should revisit the question I asked a few years ago: Who’s growing faster? The U.S. or Europe? The answer’s the same as it was then: it’s a dead heat. As I pointed out in that previous post, people love to cherry-pick…

  • Conservative or Liberal? One Question to Rule them All

    I’m devastated that Christian Rudder hasn’t posted to the OKTrends blog for more than a year.* He did statistical analysis of the monstrous database of OK Cupid — a dating site that asks participants hundreds of often odd and quirky questions about themselves — to draw out conclusions about various, sundry, and often fascinating topics.…

  • Beckworth Promotes Platinum Coins as Obama’s “FDR Moment”!

    You know things are weird when pretty strongly right-of-center economists are proposing ideas first touted by MMT econocranks (yes, beowulf, I’m talking about you) to bring about the Obama breakout moment that progressives (despairingly) dream of at night. The world is a very strange place. And people argue with Steve Randy Waldman when he says…

  • Mitt Romney, American Parasite, Destroys America’s Mittelstand

    Speaking of “extractive elites,” don’t miss Pete Kotz’s cover story in the Village Voice, Mitt Romney, American Parasite. (I read it in their subsidiary Seattle Weekly.) It details a whole string of Bain purchases under Romney — thriving companies that were saddled with debt so Romney could extract cash in the form of “profits,” leaving the companies to devolve…

  • The American Conservative: “Extractive Elites” and “Macro-Corruption”

    It’s pretty amazing to read a cover story in, and by the publisher of, The American Conservative that could have run in The Nation, Mother Jones, or on Daily Kos — almost. Certainly America’s top engineers and entrepreneurs have created many of the world’s most important technologies, sometimes becoming enormously wealthy in the process. But these economic successes are…

  • Encouraging Deadly Financial Viruses

    Randall Wray highlights two great insights that arose at the annual Minsky conference last week in NYC. First Joseph Stiglitz (Wray’s words, emphasis mine): Recall that part of the reason for the creation and explosion of derivatives was to spread risk. For example, mortgage-backed securities were supposed to make the global financial system safer by…

  • Lending, Velocity, and Aggregate Demand

    JKH likes this line in Keen’s response to Krugman: The endogenous increase in the stock of money caused by the banking sector creating new money is a far larger determinant of changes in aggregate demand than changes in the velocity of an unchanging stock of money.” It struck me as an empirical question: how do…

  • Keen Answers Krugman

    I think Steve handles it admirably, and admirably briefly, so in this case I’ll simply point you over there. On bank lending’s creating deposits and Paul Krugman’s response | Credit Writedowns. Cross-posted at Angry Bear. Related posts: Defining “Reserves” The Central Flaw in Krugman’s Argument Against Keen One Place Where Mankiw Makes Absolutely No Sense…

  • The Central Flaw in Krugman’s Argument Against Keen

    The key failing in Krugman’s response to Steve Keen’s response to Krugman’s paper (PDF) is here: If I decide to cut back on my spending and stash the funds in a bank, which lends them out to someone else, this doesn’t have to represent a net increase in demand. Krugman assumes here that people have to save (spend…

  • Steve Keen Flexes His Muscles

    Super Corporate Heroes: Truth, Justice, and How Much Does It Pay?   Related posts: How Corporations Became People The Real Delegate Count: Ignoring the Super(fluous) Delegates Is Honesty a Conservative Moral Value? S&P 500 Earnings: The Most Depressing Graphic I’ve Seen This Year Why Libs and Cons Should All Love Milton Friedman’s Corporate Tax Proposal

  • Thinking About the Fed

    JKH has magisterial post up on the recent dust-up over Saving as perceived in various sectoral models — one-sector (global, for instance, or government- and trade-balanced domestic private sector); two-sector (government and private including international); the most common MMT construct, the three-sector model (government, domestic private, and international); the rather uncommon four-sector model (government, international,…

  • It’s a Spending Problem, Right?

    Well if so (something I’m not asserting), it’s a Republican spending problem: Economist’s View: Per Capita Government Spending by President. Cross-posted at Angry Bear. Related posts: Saving and “Government Saving” You Gotta Give Reagan Credit Rules? In Knife Fight?! Now (Also) Blogging at Angry Bear Why Economists Don’t Understand Accounting, or Business

  • When Do Humans Want to Share the Wealth?

    Jonathan Haidt reports an interesting experimental result: Two three-year-olds walk up to a marble-delivery machine that has two bins. Each stands in front of one bin. Three scenarios: 1. One bin has three marbles in it, the other has one: the winner is unlikely to share to equalize the takings. 2. There are two ropes…