The Fed is the one institution in America that is specifically responsible for centrally planning our economy by controlling the supply of money, the price of money (interest rates), and the inflation rate. Although the press and the textbooks commonly…
Blog Archives
Inheritance and Meritocracy
I have been reading Kaushik Basu’s Beyond the Invisible Hand: Groundwork for a New Economics lately. Basu proposes that the world would be much better off with a much bigger inheritance tax because it would reduce persistent inequality. It won’t…
Posted in Medianism
Bombing People For Freedom
Kaushik Basu says that the Vietnam War was ostensibly fought in the name of promoting democracy and freedom. But official US war statistics don’t make it sound very free and democratic: The Indochina War, centered in Vietnam, was the most…
Posted in Medianism
The Paradox Of Debt
There are various macroeconomic theories that claim recessions are caused by changes in debt. These theories make intuitive sense. For example, in Minsky‘s version, investors get overly speculative during periods of economic stability and take greater and greater risk in…
Posted in Macro
Colleges Neglect The Needs of The Median
Yesterday I wrote that the US is moving towards a more Asian-style culture that is focused on manufacturing meritocracy, where elites are paying for more educational enrichment than the average American can afford. However, it isn’t really clear to me…
Posted in Labor
Manufacturing Meritocracy
I was recently talking with some wealthy parents and I was struck by how they are able to lavish private preschool education on their children that cost more than the $30,000 tuition at private colleges like Bluffton University and then…
Posted in Inequality, Labor
Distribution Matters
Kevin Drum gives a little statistical lesson about how thresholds have very different effects when they apply to the center or the tail of a statistical distribution. In the case of violent criminals, a slight shift in the distribution has…
Medianism 