I just finished listening to the Census Bureau press conference about their latest releast of median income, poverty, and healthcare data. The startling news is this: Real median incomes in 2015 for family households ($72,165) and nonfamily households ($33,805) increased 5.3…
Blog Archives
Unmasking Millionaire Superheroes: Nils Bohlin
Dylan Matthews at VOX shows a graph from the WHO that the trend of rising life expectancy has been continuing since 1990: Life expectancy has been rising fastest in low income countries which have the lowest life expectancy, but average life…
Posted in Millionaire Superheroes
Government debt is not like individual debt
Note: This is an update of an old post. Paul Krugman explains why US government debt never has to be repaid. Deficit-worriers portray a future in which we’re impoverished by the need to pay back money we’ve been borrowing. They see…
Posted in Macro, Public Finance
Krugman is confused about whether inflation or taxation is more contractionary!
Krugman writes: …a deficit ultimately financed by inflation is just as much of a burden on households as one ultimately financed by ordinary taxes, because inflation is a kind of tax on money holders. From a Ricardian point of view,…
Ricardian Equivalence and Hoarding
Ricardian equivalence is the theory that a rise in government deficits will cause taxpayers to increase their savings because they know they will have to pay for it in a future tax increase. Ricardian Equivalence stems from economic models that…
Posted in Macro
Capitalism rests on socialist foundations.
Yesterday I noticed that one of my colleagues, Dr. George Lehman, will be giving a presentation entitled, “Having it both ways: Costa Rica as an alternative to the capitalism-socialism debate.” George always gives interesting presentations and whereas I’ll probably agree…
The math behind whether condoms cause teen pregnancy
Via Sarah Kliff, I see that a new research paper found that schools giving out free condoms had a 10 percent increase in teen births. This is contrary to the past studies I have seen which show that free birth control led to fewer pregnancies…
Posted in Health, Managerial Micro
Medianism 