Washington Center for Equitable Growth | Is Growth Getting Harder? If so, Why, and What Can We Do About It?: The Honest Broker for the Week of December 1, 2013. Attention Conservation Notice: tl;dr. 9000 words trying to work my way through and in the process provide a reader’s guide to the techno-growth stagnation arguments of Robert Gordon, Tyler Cowen, and Brink Lindsey. The arguments are powerful. The authors are very serious economists. I wind up skeptical, and optimistic–partly because I am a techno-optimist by nature, partly because I am a politico-optimist and I think the literature confuses the past generation’s failures in distribution and demand-management due to political dysfunction with failures in accumulation and innovation, and partly because I have a different more micro-incremental conception of the process of economic growth than does Robert Gordon.
I. Back in 1990 Paul Krugman wrote a little book–a very nice little book–called The Age of Diminished Expectations. How should we assess argument? II. Let us start with Brink Lindsey: Why Growth Is Getting Harder: And so let us turn to the mid-range… III. Tyler Cowen says: “yes”. The A-b-e Of Economics. And the world said “Let Shinzo Abe be”, and all was light. “The point is not that I have an uncanny ability to be right; it’s that the other guys have an intense desire to be wrong.
And they’ve achieved their goal.” Paul Krugman A new craze is sweeping the planet. The image I have in mind isn’t exactly that of the community of central bankers all dancing the Harlem Shake in unison, but for all the economic sense it has it might as well be. While the creation of the Takahashi lineage may be important for home consumption in order to make the Japanese themselves more comfortable with the adoption of a set of radical and even unprecedented measures – Japan isn’t exactly the country you would expect to be in the vanguard of a major economic experiment with extensive global implications – the resonance of Abenomics outside the country among those with little knowledge of economics and even less of the specificities of the Japan problem is perhaps rather more surprising.
So the idea is this. How Does the Film Industry Actually Make Money? Daily chart: The world's shifting centre of gravity. How the world's economic centre of gravity has shifted IT IS not exactly news that the world's economic centre of gravity is shifting east. But it is striking how fast this seems to be happening. In a new study on the economic impact of urbanisation the McKinsey Global Institute, the research arm of the eponymous consultancy, has attempted to calculate how this centre of gravity has moved since AD 1 and how it is likely to move until 2025.
Although the underlying maths (which involves weighting the approximate centre of landmass of a country by its GDP) has to be taken with a pinch of salt, the calculations show that the centre is rapidly shifting east—at a speed of 140 kilometres a year and thus faster than ever before in human history, according to Richard Dobbs, one of the authors of the study.
The main reason for this is rapid urbanisation in developing countries, in particular China. As people are moving into cities many are becoming richer, driving further economic growth. Is Canada Too Smug About Its Economic Future? Over the past four years, Canada has been feted as the country that does practically everything right. Its banks are beloved by everyone from economist Paul Krugman to Moody’s Investment Service (MCO), which rated them earlier this year as the safest in the world. While U.S. politicians bickered for years over free-trade deals with South Korea, Colombia, and Panama, Canadians signed several pacts and launched free-trade talks with 50 other nations. Its economy has grown faster—and its debt has stayed smaller—than its Group of Seven peers. (The International Monetary Fund expects Canada’s net debt-to-GDP ratio to be 33 percent by 2016, compared with 85.7 percent in the U.S.)
Even the controversy over Canada’s Keystone XL pipeline underscored the fact that Alberta has the resources to ship more than 700,000 barrels of oil a day to U.S. refineries. What a problem to have. I spoke with Hodgson on Monday to get a sense of how dire the outlook might be. So what’s the problem? Pricing energy.
Interfluidity. New Monetarist Economics: QE2 is Irrelevant. How can government policy make us better off? To bring about a welfare improvement, there must be some collective action we can take through our government that cannot be replicated by the private sector. The government must have some particular advantage in the activities it chooses in order to be doing anything useful. If the government is bad at running coal mines, it should let private firms run coal mines, and if the government is a bad banker, it should stay out of the banking business. However, we know that the government has an advantage in doing some things. For example, I think we can all agree that the government has an advantage in running the army. If the government is no better or worse than the private sector in some activity, then if the government engages in more of that activity this is irrelevant.
Ignoring payments systems issues for simplicity, the Fed's typical actions matter because of its monopoly on currency issue. What does this imply for current Fed policy? CEE has fracking potential, says KPMG. Russian relief at shale boom hitches. Library of Economics and Liberty. Blogsecon.