Asymptosis: Always Approaching

Asymptosis: always approaching

  • Underconsumption, Income, Wealth, and Capital Gains

    I’m rather devastated to find (thanks to Tom Brown at Pragmatic Capitalism!) a discussion  I missed at Winterspeak’s place from mid-December, with some of my favorite commenters going after the underconsumption argument that I’ve been going on about. It starts by citing Mark Sadowski’s comment from Interfluidity “clarifying the difference between wealth and income.” I found that rather puzzling at first…

  • The “Global Savings Glut” Is Conceptually Incoherent. “The Economy” Cannot “Save”

    When you hear people talk about the Global Savings Glut, you can be quite sure they are talking about monetary “savings” — the global aggregate stock of money embodied in financial assets. What they don’t seem to realize is that the net holdings of global financial assets minus liabilities — claims and counterclaims — is…

  • Brad DeLong Sez It! Inequality Kills Growth

    Okay well he doesn’t say it quite so succinctly. Or categorically. In fact he hedges his statement several ways from Sunday, and uses a hundred-and-twenty-three-word paragraph to do so: The near-consensus view over here at Equitable Growth and at the Equitablog is that U.S. economic growth over the past generation has been very disappointing. Too-much of our economic growth…

  • Shiller on Fama: “maybe he has a cognitive dissonance”

    Here, emphasis mine: It must affect your thinking somehow that they really believe in markets. I think that maybe he has a cognitive dissonance. His research shows that markets are not efficient. So what do you do if you are living in the University of Chicago? It’s like being a Catholic priest and then discovering…

  • Equality and Growth Is Breaking Out All Over!

    Sadly, not in the real world. But in the econoblogosphere. Much of that is arguably thanks to the newly launched Washington Center for Equitable Growth. Traveling and family time, so I can’t do a big writeup, so just a few somewhat randomly chosen links: Brad Plumer: Is inequality bad for economic growth? Jared Bernstein: The…

  • “A liberal is someone who doesn’t know how to take his own side in an argument.”

    This quote is right up there with the great Will Rogers line: “I don’t belong to an organized political party. I’m a Democrat.” Matthew Yglesias opens his recent post with it. I don’t know if he coined it, but if so, A Huge Kudos. It’s utterly and painfully true. A deservedly iconic statement. Here’s what…

  • “Saving” and Underconsumption

    Some years ago Paul Krugman gave perhaps the best argument against the inequality-causes-underconsumption theory of secular stagnation: the idea that rich people spend less of their income/wealth, so if wealth/income is more concentrated there’s less spending and less GDP/prosperity. (It’s curious how liberal economists are the ones who most commonly shoot down this argument. That’s…

  • Wealth Concentration and Secular Stagnation

    I’m rather terrified to find that Brad DeLong has replied to my recent post on this subject. I would expect greater inequality coupled with a higher propensity to save on the part of the rich to drive all asset yields down. Yet what we have seen has been a steep, prolonged fall in Treasury bond yields…

  • Elephant in the Room: Upward Redistribution, Concentrated Income and Wealth, and Secular Stagnation

    Update: Brad DeLong has replied, and I have replied to him. Dean Baker quite rightly takes Robert Samuelson to task for his op-ed on the causes of secular stagnation. Samuelson: The problem might not be a dearth of investments so much as a surplus of risk aversion. For that, candidates abound: the traumatic impact of the…

  • Insurers’ Latest Dodge to Not Cover You when You Need It: The Incredible Shrinking Network

    Today’s must-read Seattle Times article by Carol M. Ostrom and Amy Snow Landa (interactive graphic here and comparison table here) prompts me to write about a huge problem with American health insurance that I’ve been banging against quite personally in recent months. Excerpts below give an idea what an important article this is. My thoughts: Insurers are actively eliminating must-have hospitals from their…

  • Real Businessmen Respond to Quantity Signals, Not Price Signals

    Update:  “Lord Keynes” provides a great explication of Kaldor’s theoretical work on this subject. Back in the day when I was running a high-tech conference company, we had a favorite (and actually rather cruel) interview question: “What’s the best price for a conference?” There was only one right answer: “The price that makes us the…

  • “Businesses Hire When They are Swamped with Demand, Not When They Have High Profits”

    Mike Sankowski has been banging his spoon on the high chair about this forever. And rightly so. Repeat after Mike. And keep repeating it to anyone who will listen. The “higher-corporate-profits = jobs” meme is perhaps the most pernicious falsehood in political economics. How Business Owners Think For almost ten years I was co-founder and…

  • “Supply” and “Demand” for Financial Assets

    Okay, once again I’m going to sacrifice my body here, risk looking stupid by asking what seems to me to be a vexatious question. Here’s the setup: When you exchange some of your money (bank deposits) for some shares of Apple stock, those shares aren’t removed from the supply of Apple shares. (Likewise your “money”;…

  • Health Insurance Plan Comparison Calculator. Plus…Hamlet!

    Gentle Readers: Sorry to be incommunicado for so long. I’ve been working hard on a couple of projects. I built a spreadsheet for myself a few years ago to compare health-insurance plans — cost versus financial exposure/protection. I just built it out into a web app that others can use, and I’ve posted it here.…

  • A Short Economic Explanation of Nearly Everything

    Simple explanations are always suspect. So do with this what you will. It’s my basic framework for thinking about how economies work. It of course doesn’t explain everything; the headline here is tongue-in-cheek. But I find it very useful in thinking about everything else. This thinking clashes quite definitively with traditional economic teachings. But it…

  • Labor Power and Economic Growth

    Lane Kenworthy has done some of the best work on this subject. Read all his stuff. One great piece, on determinants of growth: Institutions, wealth, and inequality Only one institutional factor is strongly supported as a determinant of growth in prosperous countries, according to Lane’s really excellent statistical work: “corporatist concertation.” Corporatist concertation is not…

  • Secular Stagnation: A Three-Decade Overcorrection

    Larry Summers’ recent speech (and Paul Krugman’s paean to it) have brought the issue of secular, decades-long stagnation to the front of the econoblogosphere agenda. Tyler Cowen, of course, made it prominent some time ago. But he posited a tech cause: we’ve picked the low-hanging innovation fruit. Summers, Krugman, et. al. suggest that policies and…

  • What’s “Scarce” These Days? Borrowers, Spenders, and (Hence) Profitable Investments

    For the moment, let’s go with old saw that “economics is the study of scarcity.” (Though I disagree with it; the proper study of economics is human reaction functions.) What’s scarce these days? Certainly not supply. In an 80%-service economy suffering high unemployment and a unprecedentedly low labor/population ratio, higher demand for massages is not…

  • Congressional Republicans’ Approval Ratings in Freefall. Dems Hold Steady.

    I couldn’t resist following up on yesterday’s post with another polling outfit. Quinnipiac just came out with fresh numbers. Here’s net approval over the last five months: Currently: Negative 57% for the Pubs, compared to the Dems’ (still less than impressive) -28. Here’s the breakout: Highlight number: As of October 1, 74% of Americans disapprove of…

  • It’s Working: Pubs’ Polls Plummeting

    Give the Republicans enough rope and they’ll hang themselves? It seems to be working. Yeah, it looks like Dems have taken a hit from this whole business, as Republicans hoped they would. But like the debate in general, it’s very much not symmetrical. Combine this with the Pubs’ internal discord: are they reaching the point that…

  • Econobloggers: Does Big Government Help or Hurt Growth? Or Neither?

    Tim Kane was nice enough to include my question in this year’s Hudson Survey of Leading Economics Bloggers (PDF). Here’s the question and the results: Judging based on post-war economic data, how do prosperous, high-GDP/capita countries compare with one another? Countries with larger government sectors have _____ growth rates compared to countries with smaller government sectors. As a group,…