Jordan Ellengerg’s book, How Not To Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking has an entire chapter about how surprisingly difficult it is for people to think in terms of non-linear relationships like the equity-efficiency curve. On page 23, he draws…
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The median voter’s income is well above the median income
Dylan Matthews compiled a lot of data about the 2014 election including this graph of voter income: Unfortunately, he didn’t divide up the graph according to median income. That would give a more meaningful comparison because we could see what…
Posted in Medianism, Public Finance
A new indicator of economic development: How many years would you work to buy your life?
Although most people find it distasteful to put a dollar value on human life, people have been doing it for centuries and these judgements have always had a big impact on people. Before the 1960s, the motivation for putting an…
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,…
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 US federal government owes you $23,871. Really, it does!
Time magazine’s cover is trying to scare economically illiterate people. Time’s reasoning is exactly the same as the absurd reasoning I used to calculate the numbers in the title above. The U.S. federal government owes 56% of its debt to Americans, so the US government would literally…
Posted in Macro, Public Finance
Medianism 