NY Fed Labor Conditions

The Federal Reserve bank of New York has published a cool interactive guide to labor conditions, using some familiar and some unfamiliar metrics. It looks like they are still working out the kinks, but, when fully operational, this will be a great resource. Now, if they only make these graphics embeddable, they will be approaching the same league as the St Louis Fed...

Links of the Week - 7 March 2014

A weekly collection of links from the Conscience Warrior Newsfeed


Have we been living in an age of austerity?
Zachary Goldfarb

In a Dark Year, a Lighter Side at the Fed
Annie Lowrey

Capitalism for the Masses – Part III
Jonathan Wight

Higher Education: Different Questions Yield Different Answers
Jared Bernstein

Winners Take All, but Can’t We Still Dream?
Robert Frank

The Fed in 2008
Chris House

Screw Up In High School, If You Are Rich
Matt Bruenig

Capitalism for the Masses – Part IV
Jonathan Wight

The Minimum Wage Increase and the CBO’s Job Loss Estimate
Jared Berstein

Natural Big Lies
Paul Krugman

Warren Buffett reveals the one stock fund you need to invest in
Jia Lynn Yang

Ben Bernanke’s Biggest Mistake
Matthew Yglesias

What Effect Will a Minimum Wage Increase Have?
Brad DeLong

Should the state support anti-gay discrimination?
Matt Bruenig

Choose Your Monetary Adventure, Mt. Gox Edition
Paul Krugman

Links of the Week - 28 February 2014

A weekly collection of links from the Conscience Warrior Newsfeed


I Can’t Find Enough Skilled Workers! (At the Crappy Wage I’m Offering…)
Jared Bernstein

Time to mobilize against inflation paranoia
Ryan Cooper

Here’s why blocking the Comcast merger is good for free markets
Timothy B. Lee

Stupidity in Economic Discourse
Paul Krugman

Karl Rove: Presidents Who Leave Deficits, Bad Economies, and War Are the Worst
Jonathan Chait

Microfoundations and Mephistopheles
Paul Krugman

A Faustian Bargain?
Chris House

When Will Social Conservatives Stop Demanding Special Rights?
Josh Barro

Iron Men of Wall Street
Paul Krugman

Affairs, Domestic and Foreign
Joseph Joyce

Ferrari Capitalism
Jonathan Wight

The Trouble With Being Abstruse
Paul Krugman

The Stimulus Success
Bill McBride

Is there a use for Real Business Cycle Models?
Chris House

The Stimulus Anniversary
Paul Krugman

Technological Progress Isn't Deflation
Matthew Yglesias

Are negative interest rates really the solution?
David Andolfatto

2008
David Andolfatto

Capitalism for the Masses – Part I
Jonathan Wight

Winner-take-all and the long-tail: in response to Robert Frank

Robert Frank, in an interesting column in the NYT on the implications of technological change, argues that the winner-take-all scenario is likely to prevail over the long-tail scenario. I think it's important to distinguish between homogenous and heterogenous goods and services. For example, one of Professor Frank's examples is piano manufacture in the nineteenth century.

Piano manufacturing was once widely dispersed, for example, simply because pianos were so costly to transport. But with each extension of canal, rail and road systems, shipping costs fell sharply, and at each step production became more concentrated. Worldwide, only a handful of piano makers remain, as producers with even a slight edge have ultimately captured most of the industry’s income.

This is the textbook winner-take-all scenario. Those with the greatest comparative advantage, even if that advantage is small, drive their lessers from the market, and capture all gains to production.

Professor Frank compares the piano makers with the sellers of digital music downloads, citing research that indicates that "Digital song titles selling more than one million copies, for example, accounted for 15 percent of sales in 2011, up from 7 percent in 2007." This, according to Professor Frank, goes against the long-tail theory, which proposes that, as delivery systems become cheaper (iTunes, Amazon, etc versus big record labels and major retail stores), more market share will be captured by smaller artists.

I think there are two forces at play here. First, regarding the long-tail of digital music: Modern delivery systems likely do not nudge buyers toward top-sellers, at least no more so than archaic delivery systems. Sure, Amazon shows shoppers the top-sellers more than the niche items, but Amazon also knows something about users' preferences. I'm not sure that Amazon has ever shown me a Britney Spears or a Justin Bieber song to buy. That's probably because I don't buy that sort of stuff. I'm much more likely to see Wilco and Grant Green, because that's the sort of stuff I buy. In Olden-Times, Tower Records showed me tons of Madonna and Garth Brooks albums, probably because it had no mechanism to distinguish me from every other yahoo that wandered through the door. Thus, the modern delivery system encourages the purchase of niche titles, at least more so than the old system did.

As I said above, it's likely important to distinguish between homogenous and heterogenous goods and services. In the digital music marketplace, there are both homogenous services and heterogenous goods being sold. When I am shopping for music, I have many artists to choose from. No single one is objectively any "better" than any other; this is personal preference. As I argued in the last paragraph, niche (lower popularity) artists have a greater opportunity to be heard because barriers to entry are so low. On the other hand, Amazon provides a (more or less) homogenous service. Shoppers patronize Amazon because they are a good (easy, cheap, reliable) way to browse and buy music (and rare art, among other things). Amazon has captured much of the market because it is objectively better at providing the service it provides, than, say, whoever is selling music in brick and mortar shops in 2014. The same technology that allows the long-tail theory to hold for independent artists allows Amazon to vacuum up much of the market share in the provision marketplace.

It's not inconceivable that the winner-take-all hypothesis holds in situations where providers of goods and services can be roughly ranked from best to worst. On the other hand, if personal tastes and preferences are significantly material, there is no reason that the long-tail hypothesis cannot also be true.

Links of the Week - 21 February 2014

A weekly collection of links from the Conscience Warrior Newsfeed


Krugman the moderate
Noah Smith

How Economics PhDs Took Over the Federal Reserve
Justin Fox

A Well-Known Liberal Bias
Chris House

Do the economic facts have a conservative bias?
Noah Smith

Not All Forms of Wealth Are Equally Pernicious
Karl Smith

Big Ideas in Macroeconomics: A Review
David Glasner

Reverse Notch Blogging
Paul Krugman

The One Percent
Robert Solow

How the New Classicals drank the Austrians' milkshake
Noah Smith

Who benefits from benefits?
Chris Dillow

Eight things ‘Downton Abbey’ can teach us about the modern economy
Steven Mufson

Does cutting government make it more efficient?
Noah Smith

Why Do You Care How Much Other People Work?
Paul Krugman

Inequality and Indignity
Paul Krugman

Yellen and the Labor Market
Paul Krugman

The HFT arms race
Noah Smith

New Realities
Alicublog

Market Failure and Political Failure
Jeffrey Frankel

Economist Jason Furman is the wonkiest wonk in the White House
Zachary A. Goldfarb

"Franchise Tag," or "Really Good Kicker Tag?"

A perennial NFL story line at this time of year is the speculation about which players will be tagged as "Franchise" players, and the attendant kerfuffle over the designation of certain players by position. Most recently, it was Baltimore defender Terrell Suggs, nominally a linebacker, who felt he was due the higher salary associated with defensive ends. This year, it is (will be?) New Orleans player Jimmy Graham, nominally a tight end, who may file a grievance to receive the higher salary associated with wide receivers. The crux of both players' arguments is that they spend a greater proportion of their playing time lined up on the field in a manner more closely associated with the higher-salaried positions. The designated salary for Franchise players each year is determined by the top-end of the salaries at the tagged player's position.

Since the spirit of the Franchise designation is to avoid the loss of players regarded as essential to the franchise (team), it seems rather ridiculous that the salary of such a player should be dependent on his position. On most teams, the most essential player is the quarterback, a running back, or maybe a key defender. Regardless, if a player is deemed to be essential to the health of the team, it shouldn't matter what his position is. Because of this weird quirk in the structure of the rule, recent years have seen kickers, punters, guards, backup quarterbacks, and countless forgettable players of all positions designated as their team's "Franchise" player. The most absurd instance of this phenomenon came in 2012, when six punters or kickers were tagged. Is it possible that a specialist was the best player on six different teams?

If this is the spirit of the designation, then the best solution to these fights over a player's position is to restructure the Franchise designation to pay the designated player an average of the top salaries in the league, regardless of position. I'm not certain the number of top salaries to include, but 32 is not a bad place to start the discussion, as there are 32 teams in the league. A smaller number would make the salary higher, obviously, and may be better. That is a detail that can be worked out; getting the concept right is the important part.

Links of the Week - 14 February 2014

A weekly collection of links from the Conscience Warrior Newsfeed


Janet Yellen Should Ignore the Unemployment Rate
Matthew Yglesias

Bill Gates: ‘Capitalism did not eradicate smallpox’
Interview with Ezra Klein

Everything New Is Old Again
Paul Krugman

Senator McConnell Announces Intention to Fold Losing Hand Again
Bill McBride

President Obama Does Many Things Well but Being a Socialist is Not One of Them
Jared Bernstein

Stop Listening to Rich People
Matthew Yglesias

Soup Kitchens Caused the Great Depression, AFF Edition
Paul Krugman

The Realities of Class Begin To Sink In
Paul Krugman

Profits Up, Wages Down: What Economics Has to Say
Jared Bernstein

Money and Class
Paul Krugman

Economics Research and the State of the Union
Equitablog

Roundup: Economics of the Minimum Wage
Washington Center for Equitable Growth

Ben Bernanke's Legacy
Stephen Williamson

What if preferences are unstable?
Noah Smith

One percenter paranoia reveals dangers of inequality
Ryan Cooper

The Wisdom of Laureates
Chris House

Would You Feel Differently About Snowden, Greenwald, and Assange If You Knew What They Really Thought?
Sean Wilentz

How to Spot a Paranoid Libertarian
Cass Sunstein

PCE inflation rate lowest since 2009 - key to future Fed policy
Sober Look

The Moral Hazard of the All-Volunteer Army
Uwe Reinhardt

Links of the Week - 7 February 2014

A weekly collection of links from the Conscience Warrior Newsfeed


The most damning critique of DSGE
Noah Smith

The Raleigh Experiment
Paul Krugman

Capital in the long run
The London Economist

Is There One Economic Model to Rule Them All?
Mark Thoma

Noah Smith’s not-so-damning critique of DSGE models
Chris House

Tribal Reality and Extant Reality
Noah Smith

The Vicious Circle of Income Inequality
Robert Frank

The Anti-Scientific Revolution in Macroeconomics
Paul Krugman

Congress is a millionaires' club. Why that matters, and what we can do about it.
Kathleen Geier

Alternately, I suppose all those ex-coal miners in kentucky could just become new-media entrepreneurs
No More Mister Nice Blog

What liberals get wrong about single payer
Ezra Klein

How will conservatives save the poor?
Noah Smith

5 reasons why your pay isn't rising as fast as it should
Mark Thoma

A Quiet Win for Banks on Borrowing
Matthew Yglesias

Rational Expectations and Reality
Chris House

Is the U.S. too corrupt for single-payer health care?
Ezra Klein

Why stopping the next financial crash is an impossible dream
John Aziz

The equation at the core of modern macro
Noah Smith

Paul Krugman & The Nature Of Economics
Chris Dillow

The Moral Indignity of Social Democracy
via Brad DeLong

Links of the Week - 31 January 2014

A weekly collection of links from the Conscience Warrior Newsfeed


Throwing away the key
London Economist

The new debtors’ prisons
London Economist

Life without parole is an outrageous sentence for non-violent criminals 
London Economist

Rise of the distorporation
London Economist

Labour pains: All around the world, labour is losing out to capital
London Economist

Britain leads a global push to rethink the way economics is taught
London Economist

Turning workers into capitalists
London Economist

The monolith and the markets
London Economist

Raising the floor
London Economist

The logical floor
London Economist

In Praise of Art Laffer
Paul Krugman

The NYT spreads AEI’s Big Lie of the Crisis
Ryan Chittum

The Urban Institute on the Probability of Female Survival to Age 50 in the OECD: Graph of the Week
via Brad DeLong

Tax Frenzies and How to Hose Them Down
John Scalzi

After Obamacare Is No Longer Doomed, It Will Become a Scandal
Jonathan Chait

Something to Behold
Josh Marshall

How to Tell If Fiscal Policy Works
Mark Thoma

What Alan Greenspan Has Learned Since 2008
Justin Fox

What’s That You’re Calling a Bubble?
Justin Fox

Lane Kenworthy on 'Social Democratic America'
interviewed by Dylan Matthews

Taxi Medallions, Congestion, and Coase

The economic case against occupational licensing is, roughly, that it creates, implicitly or explicitly, an artificial cap on supply, increasing price for the licensed good. The political economy case against occupational licensing is, roughly, that, since it is done by the government, it is definitionally inefficient. (The technical term, in the discipline, is 'baaaaad.' Related note: If saying 'Government is baaaaad' makes you sound like a sheep, there may be two reasons for that.)

Typically, the artificial supply constraint is inefficient because there is nothing to be gained by limiting, for example, the number of barbers or nail-ladies or African-hair-braiders in a given market. If there suddenly appeared a barber shop on every corner, the market would drive down the price of haircuts until some number of barbers couldn't or wouldn't continue doing business.

The idea of externalities, or spillovers, is that the costs and benefits of some transactions are not captured directly in the transaction. A positive externality occurs when a social benefit accrues to people not party to a transaction, such as the construction of a wind farm to provide electricity. Even those who do not buy the electricity generated by the wind farm will likely suffer from less pollution if there is a move away from coal power. A negative externality occurs when a social cost is inflicted upon people not party to a transaction. A common example is cigarette smoking. Those near to the smoker are exposed to the smoke through no choice of their own.

The intersection of the licensing problem and the spillover problem is the taxi medallion problem. Taxis in New York are capped through the issuance of medallions that the car must display on its hood. There cannot be more taxis than there are medallions. Thus, the cost of medallions can be rather high. At an auction last November, 200 medallions were sold for 'record prices of up to $1.3 million each.' This is a fairly efficient market, so observers can conclude that the buyers of the medallions plan to recoup their purchase price within the bounds of their discounted time-consistent indifference curve between spending now and spending later.

The question is whether taxi medallions should be $1.3 million. Does this not inflate the price of taxi services? Is this not the big, baaaad state expropriating from its sovereign citizens? That depends, of course, on whether or not you remember our little chat about externalities from before.

If Jasper contracts with Theophilus for taxi services to get Jasper from, say, the Cedar Tavern to La Lanterna, and does so at a miraculous time when there are zero cars on the streets in between, it will take ~4 minutes. If there is another car somehere in between, it will still likely take about four minutes. If there are two cars in between, it will still likely take about four minutes. Therefore, the cost of each additional car on the road in terms of Jasper's time is zero, right?

Right?

If there are three hundred cars on the streets between the Cedar and La Lanterna, the cost to Jasper is no longer trivial. Thus, each additional car exacts a cost in each other car. Since taxis make up a large proportion of vehicle traffic in New York, it makes sense to limit their number. The theory is akin to that behind congestion taxes; the revenue raised through traffic-mitigation taxes can be put toward less-congestive infrastructure. 

The challenge, of course, is in identifying an optimal method and magnitude of application. Certainly, in many less congested areas, there is simply no need for such intervention. In Durham, North Carolina, where I live, the only traffic I ever really encounter is around schools at opening and closing times, and at certain times in the very small downtown area. In communities like this, the cost of identifying specific problem areas and implementation of congestion taxes for those areas is likely greater than the social benefit of the taxes. In a congested area, detailed studies of the precise manner of congestion is necessary to determine the exact nature of the problem. Once that is accomplished, a reliable and efficient implementation method must be devised. In a city with the geography of New York could, for example, collect a fee for cars to enter the city and collect a surtax on car registration at addresses in Manhattan.

Many people would call such a plan "heavy-handed." Whether that's because they are drivers who would not appreciate the personal cost, or because such people are inherently opposed to any sort of government intervention is beside the point. Prices determined by an unimpeded market simply do not always incorporate the full social cost and the full social benefit. Ronald Coase believed that such situations were solvable when property rights are comprehensively defined. The congestion problem confounds this formulation, and is only solvable with carefully constructed intervention.

A Retrospective Argument in Favor of QE2

The Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve (the Fed) launched its program of Large-Scale Asset Purchases (LSAP), referred to in the popular press as “Quantitative Easing,” on 25 November 2008, in response to the recession that began in December 2007. Through this program, the Fed planned to purchase $800 billion worth of bank debt, mortgage-backed securities, and Treasury bonds. By the end of the program, in June 2010, the Fed had actually purchased a total of $2.525 trillion of these securities and longer-term Treasury debt. The Fed initially ended this purchase program in June 2010 because the economy looked to be in recovery. In August 2010, the Fed began to purchase $30 billion in long-term Treasury debt per month because the recovery began to slow. This extraordinary monetary policy was deemed necessary because the Fed had already exhausted its normal policy tools, such as lowering the Federal Funds Rate (FFR), which was nearly zero (Amadeo, What Is Quantitative Easing?, 2013).

Figure 1: Ex-post Inflation in 2010

In November 2010, The Fed announced that it would buy $600 billion of Treasury debt, in order to keep its portfolio at approximately $2 trillion (Amadeo, Federal Reserve's QE2, 2012). The stated purpose of this additional LSAP (“QE2”) was to increase inflation, which had been falling steadily throughout 2010, and was threatening to fall below zero (Figure 1). With the announcement, inflation expectations (University of Michigan Inflation Expectation) immediately began to rise, with measured inflation (Core PCE) ceasing to fall, and beginning to rise in early 2011 (Figure 2). The growth rate of Real GDP, which had begun to fall off in the second quarter of 2010, has remained above one percent since the implementation of QE2 (Figure 3). While this is hardly encouraging, based on recent history (Figure 4), QE2 likely headed off another recession.

Figure 2: Recent Expected Inflation and Ex-post Inflation

Figure 3: Recent GDP Growth

In order to assess whether or not LSAP should have been discontinued in the fourth quarter of 2010, it is necessary to weigh the net benefits and costs of continued LSAP. The benefits include bolstered inflation and GDP, and reduced unemployment. The potential costs include runaway inflation and reduced purchasing power of the dollar internationally. I will weigh each of these, and demonstrate both that there existed no compelling reason to discontinue LSAP in 2010 and that no macroeconomic event since 2010 has altered this calculus.

Figure 4: Historical GDP Growth

The chief criticism of LSAP broadly is that it is likely to lead to a drop in value of the dollar (Macroeconomic Analysis). Bill Gross, manager of PIMCO, the world’s largest mutual fund, voiced this concern specifically in the run up to the announcement of QE2. "When a central bank prints trillions of dollars of checks, which is not necessarily what (a second round of quantitative easing) will do in terms of the amount, but if it gets into that territory --- that is a debasement of the dollar in terms of the supply of dollars on a global basis" (Ablan, 2010). The trade-weighted dollar index (major currencies and broad) was in the middle of a slight decline when QE2 was announced, and bottomed out six months later. It has risen for the most part since (Figure 5).

Figure 5: World Purchasing Power of the Dollar

Daniel Thornton, Vice President of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, warned in late 2010 that the then-recently announced QE2 posed a “danger [of] long-run inflation … well above” the 2% target (Thornton, 2010). Inflation expectations, as measured by the University of Michigan survey and the 5- and 10-year TIPS spreads, have been between 1.5 and 3.8 percent, while actual measured inflation, as noted above, has hardly risen above 2 percent (Figure 2). David Andolfatto recently noted that TIPS-spread-based measures of expected inflation have begun to move upward, but that the effect is more prominent on short-run expectations than on long-run (Andolfatto, 2014).

Figure 2: Recent Expected Inflation and Ex-post Inflation

Thornton also warned that “additional quantitative easing may have only modest effects on economic growth, employment, or inflation” (Thornton, 2010). In contrast, Cúrdia and Ferrero examined the effects of QE2 on GDP growth and inflation and found that QE2 led to a 0.13 percentage point increase real GDP growth and a 0.03 percentage point increase in inflation. This effect owes much to the effectiveness of “forward guidance,” or clearer communication of Fed policy intentions (Cúrdia & Ferrero, 2013). Matthew D. Raskin also found a positive economic effect of this move toward clearer communication (Raskin, 2013). The analysis by Cúrdia and Ferrero led them to conclude that a reduction of the FFR of 0.25 would have a more reliably positive impact on these metrics, but, as the FFR was near zero at this time, as it has been since late 2008, such a policy option was unavailable.

Figure 6: Recent Deviations From Potential

Another argument in favor of accommodative monetary policy is that the US economy has been operating significantly below potential since mid-2008 (Figure 6). Real GDP has not been below potential to this degree in thirty years (Figure 7). Reifschneider, Wascher, and Wilcox estimate (with a more pessimistic measure of potential GDP) that the US economy is currently 7% below potential as of 2013 (Reifschneider, Wascher, & Wilcox, 2013). The supply-side damage from the crisis includes labor-market inefficiency, reduced labor-force participation and capital stock, lower multifactor productivity. This is the source of their measure of potential GDP, which is below that of the Congressional Budget Office, but still markedly higher than real GDP.

Figure 7: Historical Deviations From Potential

In any macroeconomic analysis, counterfactuals are exceedingly difficult. True laboratory experiments are nearly always impossible. When available, natural experiments can prove very valuable. None of these methods are possible in the analysis of something as large, unprecedented, and deeply interwoven with both the wider macroeconomy and specific financial markets as LSAP. The analyses of Cúrdia & Ferrero, Raskin, and Reifschneider, et al. attempt to quantify specific effects of LSAP, and these analyses can form the basis for complex counterfactuals that will likely inform the papers of economic historians for decades to come.

Ultimately, the best technique to determine whether the Fed should have discontinued LSAP in late 2010 is simple benefit-cost analysis. Since the worst of the dire predictions about QE2 and beyond have not come to fruition, and show no sign of doing so going forward, and since the scaling back of asset purchases has not yet disrupted markets, and also shows no sign of doing so in the medium-term, and since there is still clearly much slack remaining in the economy, due in no small part to counterproductive fiscal policy due to political intransigence, it is impossible to conclude that it would have been wise for the Fed to discontinue LSAP in the fourth quarter of 2010.

Works Cited

Ablan, J. (2010, November 1). Fed easing may mean 20 percent dollar drop: Gross. Retrieved January 20, 2014, from Reuters: http://www.reuters.com/article/2010/11/01/us-pimco-gross-idUSTRE6A055R20101101

Amadeo, K. (2012, December 12). Federal Reserve's QE2. Retrieved January 20, 2014, from About.com: http://useconomy.about.com/od/Fed/g/QE2.htm

Amadeo, K. (2013, December 30). What Is Quantitative Easing? Retrieved January 20, 2014, from About.com: useconomy.about.com/od/glossary/g/Quantitative-Easing.htm

Andolfatto, D. (2014, January 17). U.S. Inflation Expectations: Low, But Rising. Retrieved January 20, 2014, from MacroMania: http://andolfatto.blogspot.com/2014/01/us-inflation-expectations-low-but-rising.html

Cúrdia, V., & Ferrero, A. (2013, August 12). How Stimulatory Are Large-Scale Asset Purchases? Retrieved January 20, 2014, from Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco: http://www.frbsf.org/economic-research/publications/economic-letter/2013/august/large-scale-asset-purchase-stimulus-interest-rate/

Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. (2014, January 20). [All Figures]. Retrieved January 20, 2014, from Economic Research: http://research.stlouisfed.org/

Macroeconomic Analysis. (n.d.). Criticism of Quantitative Easing. Retrieved January 20, 2014, from Macroeconomic Analysis: http://macroeconomicanalysis.com/macroeconomics-wikipedia/criticism-quantitative-easing/

Raskin, M. D. (2013, May 9). The Effects of the Federal Reserve’s Date-Based Forward Guidance. Retrieved January 20, 2014, from Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System: http://www.federalreserve.gov/pubs/feds/2013/201337/201337pap.pdf

Reifschneider, D., Wascher, W., & Wilcox, D. (2013, November 21). Aggregate Supply in the United States: Recent Developments and Implications for the Conduct of Monetary Policy. Retrieved January 20, 2014, from Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System: http://www.federalreserve.gov/pubs/feds/2013/201377/201377pap.pdf

Thornton, D. L. (2010). The Downside of Quantitative Easing. Retrieved January 20, 2014, from Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis - Economic Synopses: http://research.stlouisfed.org/publications/es/10/ES1034.pdf

Links of the Week - 24 January 2014

A weekly collection of links from the Conscience Warrior Newsfeed


10 Reasons That Long-Term Unemployment Is a National Catastrophe
Kevin Drum

Charts: The Worst Long-Term Unemployment Crisis Since the Depression
Dave Gilson, Tasneem Raja, and AJ Vicens

Rand Paul has some Festivus grievances with Washington. The unemployed have some with him.
Ezra Klein

The Plight of the Employed
Paul Krugman

Save Your Worry
Evan Soltas

“Free speech” hypocrites: Dixie Chicks, “Duck Dynasty” and America’s pointless shell arguments
Matthew Bruenig

Long run, medium run, and short run Fisher curves
Nick Rowe

Why Corporations Might Not Mind Moderate Depression
Paul Krugman

Unemployment and Profits: A dirty little secret 
Bill McBride

The Big Screwup
Paul Krugman

Time for a little Bitcoin discussion
Joshua Gans

In gold we trust?
David Andolfatto

Redistribute wealth? No, redistribute respect.
Noah Smith

On the Asymmetry of Booms and Slumps
Paul Krugman

Bitcoin Is Evil
Paul Krugman

Mixed thinking about markets
John Quiggin

Rand Slaps Down Rand
Paul Krugman

Cynical Fantasies
Paul Krugman

Jean-Baptiste Say, Cockroach 
Paul Krugman

The multi-ethnic and globalised flavour of white America’s earliest settlements
London Economist