“Conservatives will also find that Europe is much less open to immigration than the United States, that Europe generally has much lighter taxation of investment income, that few European countries uphold American-style strong separation of church and state, that European countries generally afford accused criminals fewer procedural rights, and that Europe has much less in […]
Archive for the 'Economics' Category
Jan12th2012
What about life expectancy statistics — a favorite of the critics, since Americans don’t score very high? It turns out that when you remove outcomes doctors have almost no impact on — death from fatal injuries (car accidents, violent crime, etc.) — U.S. life expectancy jumps from 19th in the world to number one! — […]
Dec28th2011
NYU economist Mario Rizzo gives a list of some of the questions and issues that serious people ought to consider on inequality:
There seems to be very little concern, in the popular press, for the causes of unequal distribution. This includes, especially, the causes of the increasing unequal distribution over the past few decades. […]
Dec21st2011
Bloomberg Businessweek reports:
Moments before a single-engine aircraft and a helicopter collided over the Hudson River near Manhattan in 2009, an air-traffic controller who should have been advising the plane’s pilot was on the phone, joking with an airport worker about a dead cat.
Nine people, including three teenage boys, died. The Teterboro, New Jersey, controller, whom […]
Dec20th2011
Leftists like to portray the European economic model as more “poor” friendly than the United States economic model. But that depends on what your preferences are: if you are poor and would prefer less disposable income with more government services, then yes, the European model would be preferable. However, if you are poor and would […]
Dec7th2011
Megan McArdle On Fiscal Stimulus
Published by in Economics, Fiscal Stimulus and ModernPolitics. 0 CommentsMcArdle makes a decent case to be cautious about fiscal stimulus here:
Starts to pick up at the 3 min mark.
Oct28th2011
“Here is a fact that you might not have heard from the Occupy Wall Street crowd: The incomes at the top of the income distribution have fallen substantially over the past few years. According to the most recent IRS data, between 2007 and 2009, the 99th percentile income (AGI, not inflation-adjusted) fell from $410,096 to […]
Oct18th2011
For the record, I agree with every single point David Frum makes here against Republicans in general:
On the most urgent economic issue of the day – recovery from the Great Recession – the Republican consensus is seriously wrong.
It is wrong in its call for monetary tightening.
It is wrong to demand immediate debt reduction rather than wait […]
Oct14th2011
This inevitable tradeoff appears again in UC online class offerings:
Lecturers make up nearly half the undergraduate teaching corps. They fear — with good reason — that the classes they teach are the most likely to be moved online. Their union, an affiliate of the American Federation of Teachers, has negotiated a deal […]
Oct12th2011
“The University of California last week tentatively agreed to a deal with UC-AFT that included a new provision barring the system and its campuses from creating online courses or programs that would result in “a change to a term or condition of employment” of any lecturer without first dealing with the union. Bob Samuels, the […]
Oct10th2011
Economist Russ Roberts writes:
The death of Steve Jobs is a useful reminder of the fact that much wealth is not winner-take-all but winner makes everybody better off. Steve Jobs’s estate is estimated to be something between $6 billion and $7 billion. About 2/3 of that is Disney stock he received when Disney […]
Oct6th2011
“I have an even better argument against tax cuts for the rich. According to Bernstein’s logic, they don’t even work for the rich. If you look at the mean income for the top 20% of all families, it also shrinks between 1989 and 1992, grows between 1992 and 2000 and falls between 2000 […]
Sep14th2011
“Save for the one transcontinental line that received virtually no subsidies (J.J. Hill’s Great Northern), the building and operation of the other three lines were contaminated with graft, fraud, and corruption – of which the Credit Mobilier scandal is only the most famous instance. And on top of these shenanigans that […]
Sep12th2011
“Indeed, the share of top incomes coming from capital is much lower now than it has been historically. According to Emmanuel Saez, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley, for the richest Americans — those in the top 0.01 percent of the distribution — the percentage of income […]
Aug3rd2011
John Taylor, defends his view that post the 1970’s America entered “a period of unprecedented economic stability and growth in the ’80s and ’90s.” He writes:
No one can deny that the 1930s and the 1970s were tough decades for the economy. And job creation in the expansions of the 1980s and 1990s was […]
Jul29th2011
The Deregulation Era And Developing Countries
Published by in Capitalism, Economics, Inequality and Poverty. 1 CommentLefties often label the era from the late 1970’s to today as the era of deregulation where wages stagnated, income inequality increased, and overall the rich got richer at the expense of the poor. They argue that we should go back to the economic era from roughly the end of WWII, to the late 1970’s. […]
