Most Americans think that war is good for the economy. This is a fairly unique perspective. I doubt people in many other nations have this perspective because the US has exclusively fought our wars somewhere else since the Civil War…
Yearly Archives: 2015
Is there enough gold in the world to go back on a gold standard?
Update: 2018 Presidential candidate Ted Cruz wants to return to the gold standard. Is there is enough gold to do so? The short answer: Yes, there is enough gold in the world to go back on a gold standard, but…
Posted in Macro
Help the poor by helping the median
A lot of Americans actively dislike poor people and according to recent research, this trend has gotten stronger in recent years. Alec MacGillis summarizes some of the research: surveys… show a decades-long decline in support for redistributive policies and an…
Posted in Medianism
Good monetary policy raises inflation during recessions
Fed chair Ben Bernanke thinks he had the best record on inflation since WWII because he held inflation down so low, but Moneybox argued that he actually had the worst because higher inflation would have been beneficial to the economic recovery:…
Posted in Macro
If The Fed Could Not Raise Inflation
Moneybox explains a ridiculous theory expounded by really smart economists like Cochrane, Galbraith, and Summers, about the impossibility of inflation. John Cochrane [is a conservative whose] opinion …about inflation is strangely widespread across ideological lines. He says that not only…
Deflation is worse than inflation. Inflation can be good.
Most people hate inflation and think that deflation would be a wonderful thing because deflation means that the value of money is rising. It sounds like money for nothing because your money grows in value as it sits in your…
Posted in Macro
Small families are good for economic development.
According to the Economist magazine: In the 1980s, population was regarded as relatively unimportant to economic performance. American delegates told a UN conference in 1984 that “population growth is, in and of itself, neither good nor bad; it is a…
Posted in Development
Medianism 