As part of our “Data and aggregates” playlist for macroeconomics we’ve added a video on GDP as income, and how to think about other national accounts measures in terms of income – after all, in some circumstances different measures can make more sense for a given question.
For those who don’t want to listen to a video, we’ve popped the script below.
Read moreNote – this was going to be a video, but the day after writing it up I already saw better posts on it here and here and also here. However, the text I wrote is kept below as it adds an occasional additional point – so feel free to read those posts and this one 🙂
The increase in prices in the US over the past year has been generating considerable angst – and comments that “price controls are needed to deal with inflation, due to corporate greed”. This has led to lots of people saying things on Twitter, with individuals who different people may see as authorities taking very different views on the topic:
How about we step back from the name calling to try to think about what these terms mean and what people are saying – as in the end it is likely people are talking a little bit past each other, and when that happens the rest of us can just get confused!
Read moreHi all – below is the text version of our book review of Thomas Piketty’s “Time for Socialism“. The video can be found here. Would be keen for thoughts, and if there are other books people want reviewed.
Read moreHey team,
I realised that a lot of the videos going up presuppose knowledge about what GDP is and what the purpose of GDP is – but after hearing another series of people baselessly criticise GDP I realised that assuming this knowledge isn’t really the best place to start.
So I popped a video up at the start of the “Data and Aggregates” playlist that is just about what the point of GDP is.
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Today’s video is on Okun’s leaky bucket – a metaphor that is used to describe how we would think about a trade-off between transfer resources and the total number of resources.
Such a metaphor for considering this trade-off is useful – but as Matt has noted in the past we should be very very cautious about overinterpreting this example when looking at real economic data. Hence why I got him to chat about that at the end.
Read moreI’ve just popped up a video where I am to explain what “capital” is, in terms of a factor of production in an economic sense, in under 10 minutes.
The goal was to work out what capital is (and isn’t), to describe the difference between tangible and intangible capital, and to give a feeling for how we can add up quite different capital items.
Hopefully outlining what capital is will make the research discussed here and published here a bit more useful.
Keen for your thoughts 🙂
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