David Autor has a new paper that he presented at the Federal Reserve conference in Jackson Hole, Wyoming last week where he argues that labor-saving robots (and other new technologies) won’t raise unemployment. This has been a worry at least since the…
Blog Archives
The Power Of Ideas
My last post highlighted Paul Krugman’s accusation that the top 1% richest people support bad monetary policy because they have more to gain from low inflation than the bottom 99%. But I don’t think that bad monetary policy really helps…
Posted in Inequality, Macro
The US Has High Mean Wealth, But Low Median Wealth
Ray Person sent me an article from Money Magazine that compares mean wealth with median wealth which suggests that although the US is one of the wealthiest countries in the world on a per-capita (mean) basis, unfortunately the US is…
A Parable About Efficiency and Equality
Updated Dec 13, 2023 A commentator recently asked how efficiency and equity could both increase at the same time. I have outlined the idea in previous posts, but I also think a parable is a good way to illustrate the…
Posted in Inequality, Medianism
Richer Kids Have Different Priorities
On NPR, Quoctrung Bui asked, Who Had Richer Parents, Doctors Or Artists?: A few weeks ago, we were sitting around the office arguing over this simple question: Who had richer parents, journalists or people working in finance? Doctors or artists?…
Posted in Inequality, Labor
When is equity efficient? Usually.
Updated January 15, 2024 Economics textbooks have been overly obsessed with the idea that greater equity (fairness) usually leads to less efficiency (production of goods and services). Economists typically measure equity as equality of monetary wealth because the typical economist…
It is an equity-efficiency CURVE, not a tradeoff
Economists are obsessed with efficiency which means* the maximum production of goods and services as measured at market prices. Maximizing GDP is the most common form of efficiency worship. The most popular economics textbook, by Greg Mankiw begins by laying…
Medianism 