economics
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Inequality
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The causes: A very short history of the crisis
America and the euro crisis: Debt, guilt and America's good fortune
PAUL KRUGMAN writes to explain why current-account imbalances between American states aren't as dangerous a matter as those between European states.
I COMPLAINED about the Census Bureau's faulty methods for measuring poverty in September , so I'm very glad to report that something is being done about it . Revised numbers that take into account previously excluded forms of assistance, such as food stamps and tax credits, as well as regional variation in the cost of living, show that the number of Americans living in poverty has increased less than half as much as the September report indicated. Writing in the New York Times , Jason DeParle, Robert Gebeloff, and Sabrina Tavernise report:
Measuring poverty: Welfare works
When the Queen asked economists why so few of them had foreseen the global financial crisis, our professor Geoff Harcourt and some other academics petitioned her to say, among other things, that one reason was their profession's loss of interest in economic history. That sad truth was demonstrated convincingly by two American professors, Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, in a book which has since become a modern classic, This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly . It's just out in paperback, published by Princeton University Press. In their landmark study of hundreds of financial crises in 66 countries over 800 years, Reinhart and Rogoff find oft-repeated patterns that ought to alert economists when trouble is on the way.
Economic history ignored leads to the inevitable
The Miracle of the Market
With some help from the Student Entrepreneur Society at the University of Michigan-Flint (especially Jennifer Moore), and an old 1950 Sears catalog purchased from Ebay , we were able to compare the costs of 16 typical household items in 1950 to the costs of those same items today, measured in the cost of our time to purchase those household items. Using the average hourly manufacturing wage of $1.30 in 1950 and $18.01 today, the hours of work to purchase those 16 household items in both 1950 and 2009 are displayed above (click to enlarge). In all cases, we tried to match the size and quality of the items as closely as possible in both years.Exit from comment view mode. Click to hide this space
The Economics of Happiness - Jeffrey D. Sachs - Project Syndicate
Asian Success Mythology
The blog yesterday provoked a lot of healthy debate about my claim that industrialization is mainly market-driven rather than state-driven, using Korea, China, and India as examples of industrialization out of poverty. I know I am going against the conventional wisdom of the great Asian “developmental state,” authoritarian and heavily involved in planning industrialization. So let me explain why.
We are the rich, the haves, the developed. And most of the rest — in Africa, South Asia, and South America, the Somalias and Bolivias and Bangladeshes of the world — are the nots. It's always been this way, a globe divided by wealth and poverty, health and sickness, food and famine, though the extent of inequality across nations today is unprecedented: The average citizen of the United States is ten times as prosperous as the average Guatemalan, more than twenty times as prosperous as the average North Korean, and more than forty times as prosperous as those living in Mali, Ethiopia, Congo, or Sierra Leone. The question social scientists have unsuccessfully wrestled with for centuries is, Why? But the question they should have been asking is, How? Because inequality is not predetermined.
Print - What Makes a Nation Rich? One Economist's Big Answer
“The Office”, a popular British television programme, has been shown in more than 50 countries. Its international appeal likely stems from its universal theme: managerial incompetence.
“The Office” goes to India: How bad management keeps India poor
IS-LMentary
A number of readers, both at this blog and other places, have been asking for an explanation of what IS-LM is all about. Fair enough – this blogosphere conversation has been an exchange among insiders, and probably a bit baffling to normal human beings (which is why I have been labeling my posts “wonkish”). [Update: IS-LM stands for investment-savings, liquidity-money -- which will make a lot of sense if you keep reading] So, the first thing you need to know is that there are multiple correct ways of explaining IS-LM. That’s because it’s a model of several interacting markets, and you can enter from multiple directions, any one of which is a valid starting point. My favorite of these approaches is to think of IS-LM as a way to reconcile two seemingly incompatible views about what determines interest rates.Bad Education
The Project On Student Debt estimates that the average college senior in 2009 graduated with $24,000 in outstanding loans. Last August, student loans surpassed credit cards as the nation’s single largest source of debt, edging ever closer to $1 trillion. Yet for all the moralizing about American consumer debt by both parties, no one dares call higher education a bad investment.migration
Where are the world's biggest Chinese and Indian immigrant communities? MORE Chinese people live outside mainland China than French people live in France, with some to be found in almost every country. Some 22m ethnic Indians are scattered across every continent. Diasporas have been a part of the world for millennia.Senate Inquiry into milk price wars