It’s an urban myth that Americans move more than ever.
In 2004 less than 14 percent of U.S. residents moved--the lowest figure since the Census Bureau began collecting the data in 1948 …
I seem to recall that getting people to settle down in stable neighborhoods was part of the reason our government pushed for more homeownership.
These are big (but not huge) name economists. Writing a paper as part of the NBER series confirms their elite status. Here’s what they did:
We … search for simple quantitative models of macroeconomic and financial indicators of the “Great Recession” of 2008-09.
They were thorough:
We use a cross-country approach and examine a number of potential causes that have been found to be successful indicators of crisis intensity by other scholars. We check a number of different indicators of crisis intensity, and a variety of different country samples.
Here’s what they found:
… We find few clear reliable indicators in the pre-crisis data of the incidence of the Great Recession.
If it was easy figuring these things out, we wouldn’t need a college major to learn about it.
I bash Haiti a lot in this blog: it’s the closest example to SUU of how to do everything wrong with your country.
Now Wyclef Jean is running for president of Haiti.
The pros for this seem to be that he lived in Haiti until he was 9, that he speaks Haitian creole, and he’s famous.
The cons are best expressed by this quote from the comments to the linked article: “No experience. No plan. No education. Can’t speak the language let alone proper English plus a history of not being able manage his own personal affairs based on foreclosures, IRS tax liens and his nonprofit scandal.”
Via Marginal Revolution.
There is always a lot of talk about “how this generation is different.” An extension of that is how “this new economy is different.” That’s all crap.
Being able to see similarities is a standard part of any IQ test – that’s why they give you so many analogy questions. Being unable to see similarities seems to me to be a hallmark of journalists. But, I digress.
Here. we do have a huge dissimilarity. China and India have always had the biggest economies. They stopped having the biggest economies because they fell behind in the well-being revolution of the 19th century. There is no reason to expect current economies to behave differently: so if we look at this diagram in 100 years (some of you will still be here), it will look like the left hand side, not the right hand side.
This video shows in detail what happened in the 2008 financial crisis.
What is show is the yield on different maturities of U.S. Treasury debt, against their maturity length.
A couple of points stand out:
Via James Hamilton at Econbrowser who notes that the source authors (Gurkaynak and Wright) notice a breakdown in arbitrage: dots on the graph should not separate vertically. This is what is going on in my last bullet point.
Any Keynesian must be able to explain the case of Canada – where the fraction of GDP spent by the government has gone down by over 10% over the last generation … and the country has done better.
I would love to see a small-country Keynesian macroeconomic model explain that.
The lefties say 60-70%, and I think they’re right.
I also think Mankiw adds an important point: those numbers are based on elasticities, and in the long-run the behavior of elasticities is going to push that value downward. Since almost all taxes that we really care about are enacted with a view towards permanence, this is a huge point. Unfortunately, he doesn’t give a lower bound.
Tyler Cowen thinks that Mankiw’s response is the best, but I’ll go with Feldstein’s: this question isn’t really relevant. What we ought to be plotting is tax rates against some measure of well-being, like per capita real GDP (or even better, it’s growth rate).
Read Ezra Klein’s whole piece.
