you can't stretch their operational costs ad infinitum before it becomes a problem.
1) then what is?
The Depression only ended when FDR died. How did the New Deal not slow down recovery if there was no recovery but rather depression and world war?
I already pointed out earlier that empirical studies on the minimum wage largely comes down against the ECON101 story.
Complicated for you anyway which is why you're alternately for a commie like Obama and a capitalist like Sowell. One day you'll sort it all out. I don't really hold it against you . I assume to it is survival strategy in modern academia. Nuance allows you to hide. I am surprised they haven't smoked you out by now and gotten rid of you. Do you find them tolerant and open to free speech??I know, what a shock: reality is complicated.
I'm sure you'd look so good on a stage trying to argue the depression ended in 1945
Of all people you try to push, you pick the guy who a graduate degree...
What do you have besides your bias?
.
I thought I might have missed an earlier missive of yours. Thanks for repeating it, and you other answers. It's great to have someone currently studying the discipline at a high level here at DP. I'm surprised you can find the time. Good luck with your studies. I know it can be a slog.
Thanks for the kind words.
Just to be clear, I am actually learning a lot by debating those issues on Debate Politics. By far the hardest part of economics is developping the capacity to move rapidly being highly technical and abstract ideas to intuitions about concrete problems. If you really want to stump a PhD student, you go after them with simple intuitions regarding the assumptions they make (theoretical, or statistical) or you ask them to explain to you their paper in 1 minute.
My first paper offers a large macroeconomic dataset. The contribution is that it's long to cope with changes made by statistical agencies and having the dataset available for everyone helps homogenize the research. Really, outside the US it is a pain in a**. My second paper compares machine learning methods with traditional methods from statistics and econometrics in a forecasting "horse race." The idea is that you shrink your dataset to simulate the information set you would have had to forecast in the past and it gives you an idea of how those models would have performed without the benefit of hindsight. The goal is to use the forecasting errors we generate to find out what makes machine learning perform well on macroeconomics data. In short, we compare different "tricks" introduced by computer science to find out which ones give you the biggest bang for your buck.
I am also working with one of my advisor on trying to figure out what is the best way to handle high persistance in the data when you want to study the response of a dynamic system to random perturbations, but it's very preliminary.
Bias??? you mean the Great Depression was not the Great Depression?? The economy recovered in 1930
but they forgot to stop calling the period until 1945 the Great Depression?? Lets get this straight, the New Deal was the Great Depression!!
*Here's what Henry Morgenthau, FDR's Secretary of the Treasury (the man who desperately needed the New Deal to succeed as much as Roosevelt) said about the New Deal stimulus: "We have tried spending money.We are spending more than we ever have spent before and it does not work... We have never made good on our promises...I say after eight years of this administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started... And an enormous debt to boot!"
"The New Republic"( at the time a FDR greatest supporter") noted. In June 1939, the federal public works programs still supported almost 19 million people, nearly 15% of the population" [page 313]
In fact in 1939, unemployment was at 17%, and there were 11 million additional in stimulus make work welfare jobs. Today when the population is 2.5 times greater we have only 8 million unemployed. Conclusion: legislation to make Democrats illegal
is urgently needed
(...) A graduate degree that left you befuddled somewhere between Obama and Sowell ie confused.
One thing about economics, like with the weather, you won't be held accountable especially if you have a great bust or ass. Not see sure what sustained Krugman.....whats up with this child porn thing with him. Good luck with your studies.Paul Krugman happens to be a human being and, like everyone else, he is susceptible to the consequences of motivated reasoning. This prediction was a patently stupid commentary, but he did have the required integrity to retract that statement and to admit having made a big mistake. Everyone says stupid things every now and then, but not everyone will admit to it.
As for the credibility of Paul Krugman, it depends on what is concerned. I have read his column for years and I would say that his political commentaries are not peculiarly original. You don't need a genius to comment about the possibility that some self-described fiscal conservatives are spending very liberally outside of welfare programs or that some wealthy libertarians might be holding self-serving intellectual excuses for greed. It's very superficial and uninteresting. He might have changed since the time I cancelled my NY Times subscription back in 2016 or 2017, but that part of his work always felt boring. On the other hand, if you grab a column or a blog post where he's trying to explain macroeconomic theory, I can assure you that he is going a very good job. It's very hard to boil down contemporary macroeconomic theory and the related empirical research into a simple set of intuitions. Part of the difficulty lies in the general equilibrium aspect of the theories: they involve feed-backs and spill-over effects and everything happens sort of "together." That is something Paul Krugman does unusually well. It's in fact one reason why he published so many papers in top journals: he is a genius at boiling down complicated problems to their barest essence.
Most of his papers are great reads because he's absurdly good at it. Not a lot of people are that good, but if you want a few other names, John Cochrane is also very gifted. His book on Asset Pricing and his presidential address at the AFA were exceptionally good summaries of the puzzling features of financial data. Another great writer is Bryan Kelly. He doesn't comment like Cochrane or Krugman on politics, but he always has this crazy smart way to attack problems.
Going back to Krugman, to you, he might sound like a leftwing apologist of big government. But the truth is that all the comments he made about fiscal policy, monetary policy and unconventional tools of monetary policy in the 2008-2012 period were dumbed-down versions of key references in the macroeconomics literature. I know because I'm a PhD student in economics and read those papers . We're talking about interesting work by Eggertsson, Woodford, Christiano, Eichenbaum and himself published in the 2010-2011 window. His comments did reflect the growing concensus in the literature. Looking back,
you might have better counterarguments today, but they involved a lot of theoretical innovations and empirical research carried years later. The issues are still contentious matters today, as far as I can tell and, frankly, the guy has been consistent: it's not like he's writting one thing in journals in saying another on his blog.
A lot of people take way too extreme a position to make known what often are legitimate concerns. Of all the things he could say about a Nobel Prize in economics who still publishes in top journals, he took the extreme position that he is entirely unrealiable. You can have legitimate concerns about Krugman's capacity to summarize complicated issues on account that his comments on issues lying outside his expertise tend to be a lot less deeply thought out and tend to all lean in one predictable direction. But you really don't need to go as far as trying to paint him as some kind of joke to make that point. Limited usefulness in some fields is a much weaker assumption than complete uselessness everywhere.
Always go for the least binding assumptions you need. They appeal to more people and they're likelier to be roughly true in reality.
I have been away from my computer (on vacation) and broke my tablet, so I have been relegated to reading and posting with my cell phone. I would have liked to respond to a number of your detailed posts, but that and character limitations prevent lengthy quotes. I appreciate the level of discussion you provide. This particular post captures most of my views on the subject succinctly, so I wanted to endorse it. In particular, I agree with your final conclusions.I already pointed out earlier that empirical studies on the minimum wage largely comes down against the ECON101 story.
One reason is that employment dynamics involves comparing a lot more than just wages and some measure of employment, be it the number of jobs or the number of hours worked, so employers might be spreading around their reactions. Another reason I gave is that the supply-and-demand model might not be peculiarly good at capturing important features of the labor market. It's also quite the weird conceptual framework to address the arguments of people who support minimum wage. Proponents of the minimum wage make a point about market power and bargaining capacity that the competitive framework kills by assumption and they aren't making an absurd point, so you need a more general setting to address these concerns. Another possibility is that you sometimes have a negative impact, but it's too small to be statistically significant.
My intuition is that you might have some slack to use a minimum wage to benefit workers at the expense of businesses if you want to do it. How much slack? Well, I have no idea. The only thing I know is that businesses are started and operated to turn a profit large enough to compensate for risks and you can't stretch their operational costs ad infinitum before it becomes a problem.
James, I have only ever read you parrot partisan nonsense. You're every bit as much a perody of yourself as the complete lunatics who writes in gender studies -- and we could pull the same hoaxes on you as others have pulled on them. Nobody needs your input. We already know what you're going to say. You're going to fling crap around, pretend to know things you clearly don't understand and make some hyperbolic statement about conservativism using completely stupid expressions like "Republican capitalism."
Many people say stupid things every now and then, but I've never seen someone so pointless, dishonest and incapable of understanding what other people write.
how can 16 years of Depression and world war be net beneficial???????? Do you want another depression and world war for the net benefits??
ad infinitum?????????? Usually cant stretch them at all because they are fighting to have a lower price than competition just to survive. America lost 20 million jobs, and a whole lot more, to China because wages matter even when they are small fraction of final price!!
China just switched to Chicago Republican capitalism and prevented another 60 million from slowly starving to death and eliminated 40% of the entire planets poverty. Now do you understand?
1) If he admitted that I'll pay you $10,000. Bet??
2) so you think the less capital job creators have the more jobs they can create?? In venture capital we say, "the more shots on goal the more ventures we score" How does taxing away our capital fund new ventures like Apple and Amazon?? Bezos said the most important $50,000 in is life was the $50,000 he needed to start Amazon. Do you understand now? IF you want to give job creators money rather than tax it away that would make sense. 1+1=2
Obama was an anti business socialist with worst recovery in American History so how could he do anything but harm economy???????? Economy took the day Trump was elected. He is pro-business not anti business anti the economy. 1+1=2
What many, many ideologues (on both sides) fail to understand is that FDR, Obama, and even Elizabeth Warren were/are fully committed to capitalist America. Being pragmatic and having idealistic goals are not mutually exclusive, and are, in fact, mutually reinforcing. National ambition and progressive ideas require a thriving economy. At the same time, the economy really doesn't "thrive" if everyone can't participate. Andrew Yang's "freedom dividend" plan isn't nuts, it is a serious concept backed by serious economists looking at the future of capitalism. Similarly, concepts like universal healthcare and a minimum wage are not anathema to thriving capitalism but enhance most markets. People, generally, need to get their collective heads out of their collective asses and realize that economics is not a zero-sum game. We really are all in this together.Actually, Obama was a corporatist.
What many, many ideologues (on both sides) fail to understand is that FDR, Obama, and even Elizabeth Warren were/are fully committed to capitalist America. Being pragmatic and having idealistic goals are not mutually exclusive, and are, in fact, mutually reinforcing. National ambition and progressive ideas require a thriving economy. At the same time, the economy really doesn't "thrive" if everyone can't participate. Andrew Yang's "freedom dividend" plan isn't nuts, it is a serious concept backed by serious economists looking at the future of capitalism. Similarly, concepts like universal healthcare and a minimum wage are not anathema to thriving capitalism but enhance most markets. People, generally, need to get their collective heads out of their collective asses and realize that economics is not a zero-sum game. We really are all in this together.
The most important things for a thriving macroeconomy are universal participation (in a meaningful way) and reduction of frictions. Volatility is only a friend to speculators and economic leeches. The biggest friction is uncertainty. Set the rules and let's get on with the game. We'll sort it out and win together, with everyone sharing in our success.
You used the word sharing.
SOCIALIST!!!
On a serious note, a question I consistently ask, is if machines do all the work, what are the humans going to do to get paid? Machines don't eat, buy houses or cars, they don't have kids, and they don't go to college. The answer I tend to get is a garbled combo about machine technicians (as if business owners would invest in machines just to break even dues to repair costs, lol), or even further gabbledeguck about the free market creating new avenues, because that's what happened with farmers a 100 years ago.
In other news, lots of truck drivers and cab drivers better firm up their 10 year plan, the future is looking pretty bleak for them.
CEO compensation has grown 940% since 1978
Typical worker compensation has risen only 12% during that time
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