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.

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.

Taibbi stumbles close to the truth

In a blog post on Rolling Stone called "Obama Doesn't Want a Progressive Deficit Deal," (go read the whole thing; it's short, I'll wait) Matt Taibbi is both right and wrong in his summary:

I simply don't believe the Democrats would really be worse off with voters if they committed themselves to putting people back to work, policing Wall Street, throwing their weight behind a real public option in health care, making hedge fund managers pay the same tax rates as ordinary people, ending the pointless wars abroad, etc. That they won't do these things because they're afraid of public criticism, and "responding to pressure," is an increasingly transparent lie. This "Please, Br'er Fox, don't throw me into dat dere briar patch" deal isn't going to work for much longer. Just about everybody knows now that they want to go into that briar patch.

I don't think the Democrats would be worse off with most voters either. Some voters will be demagogued no matter what Obama and Congressional Democrats do or don't do. And then there's racism, of course. But the Democrats haven't retreated from bread and butter issues like job creation because they're afraid of "public criticism." They may well be, of course, but they're even more afraid of losing their lifeblood: campaign contributions from Wall Street and the rest of corporate America. That is why Obama and the Democrats enact policies that are pro-rich and pro-business. This is not rocket science.

In which I pwn Boing Boing. (?)

This post on my beloved BoingBoing irked me:

Philip Greenspun divided the U.S. 2011 federal budget by 100,000,000 and wrote a little parable:

We have a family that is spending $38,200 per year. The family's income is $21,700 per year. The family adds $16,500 in credit card debt every year in order to pay its bills. After a long and difficult debate among family members, keeping in mind that it was not going to be possible to borrow $16,500 every year forever, the parents and children agreed that a $380/year premium cable subscription could be terminated. So now the family will have to borrow only $16,120 per year.

Understanding Congress's solution to the federal deficit problem.

Oy! This is terrible economics.

Where to begin?

There's so much interesting stuff in this zero hedge post, that you should just go ahead and read the whole thing. I'll wait.

OK! Well, where to begin. The blurb that got me to read the whole article was this one, quoted from the State Department website (click on 'economic'):

Economic conspiracy theories are often based on the false, but popular, idea that powerful individuals are motivated overwhelmingly by their desire for wealth, rather than the wide variety of human motivations we all experience. (This one-dimensional, cartoonish view of human nature is at the heart of Marxist ideology, which once held hundreds of millions under its sway.)

Housing still looking for the bottom

Calculated Risk reports a new record low in housing completions last year, predicting new record lows for 5+ units for this year as well. This year might mark the bottom of the housing crash.

I am not shocked

by the news that income inequality is worse than it's been in a looooong time.

Robert Barro's pony express to lower unemployment

In a Wall Street Journal Op-Ed (why do I read these!?), Harvard economist Robert Barro claims that "according to [his] calculations" without extended unemployment benefits the unemployment rate would now be 6.8%. What are these calculations? Glad you asked!

To get a rough quantitative estimate of the implications for the unemployment rate, suppose that the expansion of unemployment-insurance coverage to 99 weeks had not occurred and—I assume—the share of long-term unemployment had equaled the peak value of 24.5% observed in July 1983. Then, if the number of unemployed 26 weeks or less in June 2010 had still equaled the observed value of 7.9 million, the total number of unemployed would have been 10.4 million rather than 14.6 million. If the labor force still equaled the observed value (153.7 million), the unemployment rate would have been 6.8% rather than 9.5%.

See? If you assume that long-term unemployment is caused by extended unemployment insurance benefits, then removing unemployment insurance extensions solves the problem of long-term unemployment (and you get a pony!). This must be why he makes the big bucks. Magical thinking.

Suppose we make a different assumption. Let's assume that changes in consumer demand has an effect on the level of employment. If so, then the decision to not extend unemployment benefits would reduce demand for goods and services. Where will the jobs come from? Businesses are not going to expand their capacity or their workforce in the face of falling demand for their products. The only way that extending unemployment benefits could actually increase the unemployment rate above what it would otherwise be (other than just assuming it will, as Barro does) is to assume that the people receiving those benefits, rather than spending them on food and rent, use the checks to set fires to businesses that are currently employing people. This assumption has the advantage of actually leading to the conclusion that Barro reaches, without magic.

Update: cross-posted at Multiplier Effect.

Not a nation, but a republic of property owners

Uwe Reinhardt in Are We a Nation of Property Owners?, uses research by Arthur Kennickell at the Federal Reserve and my colleague Ed Wolff at Levy Economics Insitute (and NYU) to argue that Michael Barone of American Enterprise Institute is wrong to say that we are a republic of property owners. The specific passage of Barone's that Reinhardt takes exception to is:

The fact is that we are once again, as in the days of the early republic and not in the heyday of the Progressives and the New Dealers, a republic of property owners. Most Americans have accumulated — or will, during the course of their working years, accumulate — significant amounts of wealth. And that is why, I believe, American voters seem to be rejecting the policies of the Obama Democrats.

Reinhardt's point, made using the research mentioned above, is that most people in the U.S. own very little property, since almost 50% of families have net worth (including homes) of $10,000 or less. So Barone is just wrong to claim that most Americans have or will accumulate "significant" amounts of wealth. Of course, if you believe that significant in this context should mean more than zero, I can't help you.
I think that Barone is onto something, though, as is so frequently the case, not what he intended. The definition of republic is:

a state in which the supreme power rests in the body of citizens entitled to vote and is exercised by representatives chosen directly or indirectly by them.

Barone was talking about a republic in the Jeffersonian sense, apparently, a republic of small property owners (or for Jefferson, yeoman farmers). What we have, essentially is a republic more in the Roman mold, where the property owners are the citizens entitled to vote. But, you say, there are no property restrictions on voting in the U.S.! Right you are, but there are certainly property restrictions on who you get to choose from when you go to vote. More accurately there are property restrictions on who gets to decide who you get to choose from. In this unintended sense, Barone is right. Reinhardt is also right to say that we are not a nation of property owners.

We are not a nation, but a republic of property owners.

In which, if you read between the lines, I foam at the mouth

Half a stimulus is better than none « Multiplier Effect

Care: effective and equitable job creation

Nancy Folbre references some research my colleagues at Levy Economics Institute and I have done: Improving Home-Care Services, Creating Jobs - Economix Blog - NYTimes.com. I'll wait while you go read her post . . .
Long story short from our research : $50 billion would provide early childhood education for the entire country, employ more people than $50 billion in infrastructure construction spending, and provide those jobs to people from the lowest income families. More effective and more equitable than most other spending in last year's too-small stimulus package.

Onion Report: Poor People Pretty Much F@$%d

Truly, the Onion IS America's finest news source: Report: Poor People Pretty Much F@#$%^d. Warning! Naughty words!

New book: Solidarity Economy I: Building Alternatives for People and Planet

I am happy to announce the publication of Solidarity Economy I: Building Alternatives for People and Planet, a Center for Popular Economics publication with the cooperation of many in the U.S. Solidarity Economy Network (ussen.org). Many thanks to Emily Kawano and Jonathan Teller-Elsberg, who both put in a lot of time and effort on this project. Especially Emily who graciously and capably took the lead on this project. Thanks also to all the authors who put in the work of producing the chapters and taking our feedback with such good grace. It's a wonderful book. Lots of interesting and hopeful perspectives on what kind of economics we humans can create and practice when we put our minds and our hearts into it. You should buy five copies.

EPI: unemployed/job ratio is 5.6

Not great, but at least it's not growing like it did all of last year: Unemployed workers outnumber job openings 5.6-to-one in March.

They really shouldn't say such things out loud.

Funny, though: U.S. Economy Grinds To Halt As Nation Realizes Money Just A Symbolic, Mutually Shared Illusion. The Onion truly is America's finest news source. My favorite paragraph:

As news of the nation's collectively held delusion spread, the economy ground a halt, with dumbfounded citizens everywhere walking out on their jobs as they contemplated the little green drawings of buildings and dead white men they once used to measure their adequacy and importance as human beings.

Tim Pawlenty dishes just what Tea-partiers want to hear

Bruce Bartlett has an excellent take-down of Presidential wannabe, Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty. I agree completely, except for the conclusion:

Tim Pawlenty is not ready for prime time. He may think he has found a clever way of appealing to the right wing tea party/Fox News crowd without having to propose any actual cuts in spending, but it isn’t going to work. It’s too transparently phony even for them.

The first sentence is fine. I don't think that last part is true: Pawlenty's reason-free rhetoric is just what many of the Tea-party types seem to want to hear.