Golden passage from Brad Delong. For once I’m going to put up a quote and not add my thoughts – as they’d just get in the way: The focus on real GDP growth and its possible–or likely–slowing is a setup to panic us into making policy decisions we really do not want to make. The “great […]
Keeping in mind Shamubeel’s point that we need to be careful looking at aggregates, I thought it would be nice to update the graph from this post back in early-2009 – when people were talking about 11% unemployment (Note: I have moved both series across a year). Cheers Statistics NZ. This supports the type […]
I see the Pope made some comments about capitalism and social justice, and a bunch of economists were unhappy with this (Mankiw, Sumner) – or were unhappy with the way economists viewed the Pope’s comments. Note: This piece is a good discussion. My view is easily summarized. Meh. I grew up in a Catholic family, […]
Via Overcoming Bias I spotted this paper on global income inequality, 1970-2009. Robin points out to be careful, as this doesn’t capture non-financial inequality, and it doesn’t look at the “lifecycle” of individuals – just snapshots of income dispersion at a point in time. Of course, these missing bits are due to data limitations, the […]
On Thursday I was in the supermarket after a long day of reading – with a long night of reading ahead. Next to me was a deal, dark chocolate Tim Tam’s, two packets for $5. They are great with coffee and so I reached to grab them – however, then the barrage of health […]
You have seen me say that some inequality is “good”, and you have seen Shamubeel say that inequality is “natural”. It was with this in mind that Shaz told me to post about this comment from Boris Johnson. Despite calling for more to be done to help talented people from poor backgrounds to advance — […]