Love it or leave it, here’s the healthcare bill situation according to Megan McArdle:
… At a defining moment in American legislative history . . . the Mothra v. Godzilla, irresistable force v. immovable object, rock v. hard place of policymaking. It can't pass and it can't fail. Yet it must do one or the other.
All I can say is, pass the popcorn.
The way you get famous is to make predictions about the future that people find outlandish, and then have them confirmed by reality.
In this case, Arnold Kling of Econlog asserts that if we are in a Minsky-Jones setting, that the economy is poised to add a lot of jobs soon.
Hyman Minsky was a somewhat discredited macroeconomist – I studied a little bit of his stuff in 1983. His basic idea was that bubbles in financial markets were to be expected, and that when they popped we’d have bad recessions. It sounds good in words, but it isn’t so easy to write out the math of how that works (remember, we use math to clarify whether hard ideas are good, or just confused). After the Great Recession, Minsky’s ideas are trendy again.
Garett Jones is an economist at George Mason University. His thesis is that firms increase employment because they want to be capable of increasing output along new dimensions (e.g., different goods, different markets).
Neither of these predictions are typical right now. If they’re right, Kling is on to something that we should pay attention to.
The news hasn’t been so rosy lately. David Leonhardt’s column from The New York Times has the details, and some pessimistic opinions.
Without being pessimistic or optimistic, I’ll note that there are some statistical issues that can lead to this sort of thing in the short-run. In particular, a lot of data can be reported at the end of one calendar term, or at the start of the next one. This can generate an error pattern in the data called a moving average or MA process.
The way to get around that is to express the data as a moving average rather than a raw number. This is a simple thing to do in Excel: average 2 or more adjacent cells in a column, put the answer in one cell of an adjacent column, move down one row and repeat. Basically, this smoothes bumps.
Only time will tell, though, if we are currently experiencing bumps that need to be smoother, or a double-dip.
Daily Kos (of all places) has a line by line explanation of everything in the Keynes vs. Hayek rap video we viewed in January.
The poll results at the bottom are surprising!
Food for thought from this paper:
… Aggregate fiscal expenditure stimulus in the United States, properly adjusted for the declining fiscal expenditure of the fifty states, was close to zero in 2009. While the Federal government stimulus prevented a net decline in aggregate fiscal expenditure, it did not stimulate the aggregate expenditure above its predicted mean.
Via Marginal Revolution.
The conventional wisdom is that Africa is doing very poorly.
This started to change about 15 years ago. It’s now becoming clearer that the growth spurt that began in Africa then is ongoing, widespread, and robust.
Critics have said that this is because of rising resources prices. Yet, this growth has occurred in countries that have not benefitted from rising resource prices.
Additionally, large amounts of this growth have occurred to per capita incomes at the bottom of the income distribution.
A former Ph.D. student of mine works for the Congressional Research Office on pension issues. He sent me a link to this site with tons of data about how the financing of public and private pensions is going in various countries (with lots of downloadable spreadsheets).
