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
Who wins when monetary policy prioritizes low inflation over wage growth or unemployment?
I’ve previously argued many times that the Fed is overly worried about inflation and not worried enough about the wages of the median American and about unemployment. Today Paul Krugman gives some back-of-the-envelope estimates of who benefits from the Fed’s…
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…
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…
Revealed Preference: The Fed Favors Money Hoarders Over The Unemployed
Ryan Avent at The Economist produced some original research about what the Fed thinks: HAVING combed through the Fed transcripts the old-fashioned way, we decided to apply some fancier techniques. We plugged all 1,865 pages of central-bankery into a computer programme…
Medianism 