Is growth what we want?

I got an email from a participant at the Center for Popular Economics 2011 Summer Institute, which I was fortunate enough to be able to teach. It was, as always a crazy busy, exciting week. The question concerned growth: whether I thought growth was necessary, and how it is related to employment. It's a pretty big question. In economics, the questions don't get much bigger. So I promised to write a blog post to give my answer. And this is that blog post. I will do my best to answer broadly, simply, and, I hope, intelligibly for any audience no matter how much or how little economics they may have been subjected to previously.

Nice piece on Mankiw's response to his students on Econospeak

Peter Dorman at EconoSpeak makes some good points about Mankiw’s Reply to the Walk-Out. Long story short: Mankiw is respectful, but wrong on some points and unfortunately right on others. Includes link to Mankiw's op-ed.

This about sums it up

Via DeLong: Matthew Yglesias's Theory of the Obama Administration in 2010: Excessive Reliance on the Second Derivative. Long story short: the Obama administration saw that it's intervention had stopped the employment free-fall of and concluded that it would just turn itself around. Wrong. That was the point at which more help was needed to reverse the damage. I would add that the Obama administration also under-estimated the extent of the damage that was already done when they came into office.

American Jobs Act. sigh.

Well, I commented last night on President Obama's speech to Congress on jobs on WGXC, my local radio station. I thought it worth putting down my thoughts on silicon, since I've already done all the thinking about it.

First of all, I thought that the delivery was one of the better than I've heard from President Obama since he took office. It reminded me more of candidate Obama. Maybe that's because this speech, more than the official announcement that he was running for re-election a while back, was the kick-off to his re-election campaign. He had that whole preacher cadence down, punctuating sections of the speech with the phrase "that's why you should pass this bill now." A nice touch, but one that was clearly not directed at the politicians in front of him, many of whom wouldn't support kibble for kittens if it was an Obama proposal.

Listen to me!

I'll be talking about President Obama's jobs speech tonight right after the speech on WGXC, 90.7FM in Columbia and Greene Counties in New York or streaming on line at wgxc.org. I'll be a guest on the Jazz Disturbance radio show hosted by the irrepressible Cheryl K.

Calculated Risk delivers the goods

And in this case the goods are graphs and data sources. Great list. Super blog!

Correcting CNN is really like shooting fish in a barrel

In an article entitled "People in affluent nations may be more depression-prone", Amanda MacMillan quotes Evelyn Bromet as saying:

Moreover, she adds, the richest countries in the world also tend to have the greatest levels of income inequality, which has been linked to higher rates of depression as well as many other chronic diseases.

I'm not qualified to comment on inequality's links to depression, but as far as the first claim? Right in my wheel-house. Consulting the extremely handy UNDP Data explorer (Go play with that data; hours of fun for the whole family!), I quickly produced the following graph (graphs are cool!):

There is no clear relationship between income and inequality. The United States, for example has high income (GDP per capita, in Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) dollars), but medium inequality (until you narrow the field to 'advanced' countries. So long story short, either the SUNY Stonybrook psychologist or the Health.com reporter got it wrong.