Kevin Erdmann at Idiosyncratic Whisk has done a number of analyses using median income. For example, below are two graphs showing an analysis of the distribution of median income across US metropolitan areas. The three lines on the graphs show that…
Blog Archives
Median living standards would be higher and inequality would be lower with better zoning regulations
Posted in Medianism
Celebrate the highest median earnings in American history (unless your money comes from owning rather than from working.)
The BLS released data Thursday showing that real median full-time workers reached all-time high earnings last year: $347/week. This is cause for celebration, but realistically, it is only 3.5% higher than it was in the 1970s so it is pretty…
Posted in Medianism
One way power corrupts is by reducing social constraints
Brian Resnick warns that Trump would be a terrible president not because the enormous power of the presidency would corrupt him, but because it would merely give him more freedom to reveal his true personality. As if we haven’t seen enough…
Posted in Development, Public Finance
How to improve median income statistics
The Obama administration touted news reports like this one from the Washington Post: Middle class incomes had their fastest growth on record last year. The Census Bureau itself was a bit more circumspect because they recognize that there is considerable…
Posted in Medianism, MELI & Econ Stats
I don’t know whether to Laffer or cry
Jordan Ellenberg’s book also points out that the Laffer curve is another example of non-linear thinking. The idea is so common today that it now seems obvious, but in the 1970s it was so novel to most people that they…
Posted in Public Finance
Supply-Side Economics is NOT a school of economic thought
When I first began teaching economics as a graduate student in the mid 1990s, I noticed that many of the principles-level economics textbooks talked about “Supply-Side Economics” as a school of economics. This was curious to me, because I was…
Posted in Public Finance
The socialism-prosperity curve.
Jordan Ellengerg’s book, How Not To Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking has an entire chapter about how surprisingly difficult it is for people to think in terms of non-linear relationships like the equity-efficiency curve. On page 23, he draws…
Medianism 