Pavlina Tcherneva tweeted a graph last month showing how the macroeconomic policy has increasingly left behind 90% of Americans. @ptcherneva: I’d like to see the data that generated this graph because it has gotten a lot of attention and I’d…
Blog Archives
How The Fed Could Help The People Rather Than The Banks
Foreign Affairs magazine recently published an article by Mark Blyth and Eric Lonergan about how central banks should use “helicopter drops.” That means to increase the money supply by giving money directly to households rather than by loaning money by…
Inequality vs Unemployment: Similar Causes, But Different Cures
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…
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…
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
Updates About MELI
I added some additional pages about Median Expected Lifetime Income (MELI) to the Medianism FAQ this week: M1. What is Median Expected Lifetime Income (MELI)? M2. Why is MELI better than GDP? M3. Why is MELI better than the United…
Posted in Medianism
Medianism 