Hillary Clinton’s recent exhortation “Don’t let anybody tell you that it’s corporations and businesses that create jobs,” has been drawing a lot of flack from conservatives, but it’s pretty much true these days. Back in the olden days, of course, businesses did create jobs. But now, not so much. Here are the number of…
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Further to Bob Higgs’s earlier post, Thinking Is Research, Too!, down in Texas, the Chairman of the Dallas Fed has the odd practice of looking beyond government stats and actually (gasp!) asking real people how they think the economy is going. From a profile of the President and CEO of the Dallas Fed, Richard…
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Bill Parker, an old friend of mine who died in 2000, was director of graduate studies in economics at Yale for thirteen years. He told me once about his struggles with his colleagues, who, he believed, were spending too much time on technique and not enough time on substance in teaching their courses. The…
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The world probably would have been much better off had macroeconomics never been devised. Although I have in mind Keynesian macroeconomics above all, I include other types of macro models as well. I even include, somewhat reluctantly, the whole quantity theory approach descended from David Hume to the Friedmanites, now known as monetarism. One…
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Recommended Reading: Challenge of Liberty Student Seminar Colorado Springs, June 17–21 2013 Below you will find the reading for the summer seminar. To fully understand each lecture, you will want to at least look at all the preparatory readings. The supplemental readings are less necessary. See especially the Plato, Cochran, and Higgs items. Monday:…
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Making sense of economic fluctuations can be a daunting task. The economy comprises a gigantic set of interrelated assets, inputs, processes, transactions, and outputs, and its dimensions can be and have been measured in countless ways. If we are to speak sensibly about the economy as a whole—recognizing that almost anything we say about…
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For decades, American families espoused the not-quite-Cartesian ontology: I go into debt; therefore I am. Household debt climbed ever higher through good times and bad. Since the onset of the current recession, however, household debt has contracted substantially for the first time in more than half a century. After reaching a peak at $13.82…
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In today’s issue of the Wall Street Journal, economics editor David Wessel has a useful column about policy uncertainty—worries about government spending, the expiration of provisions in the tax code, inflationary expectations, and the like—and its role in hampering economic growth by discouraging private investment. (The piece is available online to WSJ subscribers here.)…
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Real private fixed investment—the main driver of genuine economic growth—has recovered less than half of its loss between 2006 and 2010. As of the second quarter of this year, the amount of real private fixed (i.e., not including inventory) investment had barely recovered enough to exceed the low point it hit during the dot.com…
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Well, no, the IMF chief is a moderate Keynesian, like all her Establishment colleagues, and praises the world’s central banks for flooding the globe with cheap money. But she does recognize the critical role of regime uncertainty in hindering recovery: Lagarde said a number of factors are eroding growth. “At the center of them…
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