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In the United States, we naturally celebrate the Labor Day holiday with a holiday from work. While this may be counterintuitive for others, economists have long see the price of labor and leisure as intimately intertwined. Although prices are often stated in terms of money, which is a useful convenience, the true price of anything … Continue reading When the Time Price of Leisure Rises: The Linder Theorem
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Considerable evidence has been suggesting for some time now that children suffered learning loss from the K-12 during the pandemic. From a research perspective, it’s trickier to demonstrate exactly why children suffered such losses. School closures are an obvious possibility, and probably also part of the answer. But the other disruptions of the pandemic to … Continue reading Learning Losses During the Pandemic: Reviewing the Evidence
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It’s well-known (although it’s not clear anyone wants to do anything about it) that US budget deficits and government debt took a big jump during the Great Recession from 2007-9, then another big jump during the pandemic recession, and are projected to rise steadily in the middle-term as an aging US population leads to higher … Continue reading For the US and Global Economy, What Pathways to Reduce Government Debt?
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I have written from time to time over the years about concerns that the number of start-up firms in the US economy has been stagnant (for example, here, here and here). This is a matter of general concern, because start-up firms are often the ones providing a jolt of new goods and services, new jobs, … Continue reading Is the US Economy Seeing an Upsurge of New Firms?
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I sometimes say that one difference between those who have been trained as economists and normal human beings is that economist don’t believe in real people, but instead believe in statistical people. My point is that normal humans tend to reason from examples of particular people: perhaps a person who lost their job, or a … Continue reading Real People, Statistical People, and the Probability Grid
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Mitchell List and Kurt Schuler serve as interlocutors in “An Interview with James D. Gwartney on His Life and Work in Economics” (August 2023 (Johns Hopkins Institute for Applied Economics, Global Health and the Study of Business Enterprise, SAE #238, August 2023). The interview offers an in-depth overview of his pathway to and within economics. … Continue reading Interview with James Gwartney: Personal Choices and Public Choice
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Back around 2000, oh so long ago, e-commerce was 0.8% of total retail sales. Now, it’s about 15%. One result is that the shopping space in bricks-and-mortar regional shopping malls has declined sharply. In the next decade or so, could the new work-from-home patterns lead to a similar decline for commercial office space? Tom Doolittle … Continue reading E-commerce and Regional Malls, Work-from-Home and Commercial Office Space
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The “socialist calculation debate” happened in the 1920s and 1930s. The economics profession was developing a vision of the economy as made up of prices and quantities for goods and services, based on supply and demand. Socialist economists (for example, Oskar Lange) sought to build on this framework. Their argument was along the following lines: … Continue reading Will AI Make a Planned Economy Feasible? The Socialist Calculation Debate Revisited
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Will Blythe writes about the difficulties of actually paying attention for a sustained period of time in the digital age in “The Life, Death—And Afterlife—of Literary Fiction” (Esquire, July 14, 2023). He is particularly focused on short stories and novels, but the underlying thought applies just as well to those of us who spend a … Continue reading “Can You Read Anything At All from Start to Finish … Without Your Mind Being Sliced Apart by some Digital Switchblade?”
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The poet William Meredith (1919-2007) was known for his extraordinary care in the handling of language and ideas. He suffered a stroke in 1983, and after that only wrote about six poems per year–becoming in the process perhaps even more careful with meaning. As a description of the importance of being looking hard at data, … Continue reading What the Writers Told William Meredith
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W.H. Auden once proposed that the extent of civilization could be judged by a dual standard: both “the the degree of diversity attained and the degree of unity retained.” I don’t fully agree, but at least to me, the idea captures something important. Here’s how Auden put it in his introductory editor’s essay for The … Continue reading Auden on Civilization: “The Degree of Diversity Attained and the Degree of Unity Retained”
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The new software tools that can produce a reasonable first draft of many essays pose a sort of existential question for students: Do you care about learning and getting smarter about ideas, even if it takes more work and perhaps even risks some outright failures? Or do you just want to turn in the assignments … Continue reading Housel: How Writing Turns Gut Feelings into Tools
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In modern economics, “iceberg costs” is an assumption built into certain models of international trade The metaphor is that if you were actually trading an iceberg, it would melt along the way. The extent of the melting would be greater, the farther it was carried across the ocean. Thus, an item which needs to be … Continue reading Historical Lessons from Actual Iceberg Trading Costs
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The painter Francis Bacon (1909-1992) did a series of interviews during his career with David Sylvester. Some of them are presented in Interviews with Francis Bacon: 1962-1979, by David Sylvester, published in 1980. I’m both interested in the art and also pretty clueless, but when I’m interested, I don’t mind being clueless. (In fact, life … Continue reading “Destructive Criticism … Is Certainly the Most Helpful Criticism”
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My tradition on this blog is to take a break (mostly!) from current events in the later part of August. Instead, I pre-schedule daily posts based on things I read during the year about three of my preoccupations: economics, academia, and writing. _____________ One of the most famous Marxist statements of how an economy should … Continue reading From Each, To Each, According to What
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