Felix Salmon. Next New Deal. (Wonkish. Part One of Two. This part covers theory, part two some data.) Can the number of people quitting their jobs tell us anything useful about slack in the labor market? No. At most, it tells us to focus even more on the stuff we already knew to be watching. Evan Soltas has argued that the rate at which people quit their job tells us all we need to know about the unemployment rate, in particular how likely it is that the long-term unemployed and people who have left the labor force could be brought back into the labor force. There were several responses from Dean Baker, Jared Bernstein, and Cardiff Garcia. As a reminder, there are currently 2.5 million Americans who want a job but aren’t looking, and as such are counted as “marginally attached to the labor force” instead of unemployed.
We should distinguish between what quit rates can tell us about the employed and what they can tell us about the status of the unemployed. Vacancy Chains So Dcorp hangs a sign that says “help wanted.” Greg Mankiw's Blog. The Economy and the Economics of Everyday Life - Economix Blog. Rational Irrationality. April 14, 2014 Eight Hopeful Legacies of the Arab Spring More than three years after the Arab Spring began, the political situation in the Middle East is depressing. In Syria, a brutal civil war continues, with the forces of Bashar al-Assad gaining the upper hand. In Egypt, General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, who has overseen a drastic crackdown on political opponents, looks likely to be elected as President.
April 12, 2014 Are Speculative Bubbles Good? Are speculative bubbles good for the economy? Having spent much of the past twenty years warning about the dangers of speculation, and writing two books about bubbles and their consequences, I felt a bit like Prince Charles presiding at a conference of contemporary architects. April 10, 2014 Missing Tiger: A Masters Without Woods For golf fans, Masters weekend at Augusta National is a spring ritual that we look forward to all winter. April 9, 2014 An Important Step in Taming the Big Banks April 8, 2014 Standing Up to Comcast April 7, 2014 April 4, 2014. Poverty and Financial Distress Would Have Been Substantially Worse in 2010 Without Government Action, New Census Data Show. Six temporary federal initiatives enacted in 2009 and 2010 to bolster the economy by lifting consumers’ incomes and purchases kept nearly 7 million Americans out of poverty in 2010, under an alternative measure of poverty that takes into account the impact of government benefit programs and taxes.
These initiatives — three new or expanded tax credits, two enhancements of unemployment insurance, and an expansion of benefits through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly called food stamps) — were part of the 2009 Recovery Act. Congress subsequently extended or expanded some of them. To gauge the impacts of these initiatives on poverty, analysts cannot use the official poverty measure because it counts only cash income and does not take refundable tax credits, SNAP benefits, and other non-cash assistance into account.
Expansions in the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) and Child Tax Credit (CTC) kept 1.6 million people out of poverty. The Center's Analysis. The Palgrave Econolog - Zeitgeist. Rankings are based on the number of incoming links from other indexed economics blogs and some secret Econolog sauce. Only links from the past ninety days are counted. Readability Readability is assessed for posts published in the past ninety days using the Gunning-Fog index. The index is an indication of the number of years of formal education that a person requires in order to easily understand the text on the first reading. You can see more readability stats by clicking through to individual blogs and checking out the sidebar. 14 to 17Scientific journals 17 to 20Manual for Taiwanese DVD player Other stats Most Active lists the blogs with the highest number of posts published over the past ninety days. Note that these statistics are calculated using the RSS feed from each blog.
Economics and Politics by Paul Krugman - The Conscience of a Liberal. Goodreads | Joseph E. Stiglitz's Blog. Naked capitalism. Paul Kedrosky's Infectious Greed.