Jesse Myerson has an interesting piece about apartment rent out today. The piece is mainly about about how such rents are unearned income for landlords, who are thus like lords in the feudal sense of the word. Myerson then goes on to propose ways to deal with that. I wont talk too much [...]

New post at Policy Shop. Excerpt:

A less notable excuse has been that our unemployment woes are structural—the skills employees have are not the skills employers want—and therefore economic stimulus wont do much to solve our unemployment problem. The STEM myth has been a major element of this structural unemployment theory, at least [...]

Assume that generally MV=PY, where M is money supply, V is velocity of money, P is the price level, and Y is real GDP. Now assume that we have a bitcoin currency with a fixed money supply (M) and the velocity of money (V) is also constant. If real GDP (Y) increases, the only way [...]

New post at Policy Shop. Excerpt:

You cannot fix a problem caused by there not being not enough available jobs by training people to do jobs. It won’t work. To be sure, it would help some people get jobs in areas where there not enough workers with the right skills, given that many [...]

So some employers say that they cannot find qualified workers. Maybe that is the case in some situations, but there is a basic problem with the notion that this is holding things back. That basic problem is that if you cannot find qualified workers, you can find unqualified workers and make them qualified. If there [...]

Steve Waldman and Garrett Jones are having an interesting back and forth over at interfluidity and econlib. It’s about optimal tax rates for capital income and labor income. Jones is a big fan of the Chamley-Judd view that capital income should be taxed at zero. Waldman is not, or more accurately, [...]

Matt Yglesias had a post about left economic mistakes a few days ago. I responded in turn, focusing only on how it is completely legitimate to be worried about productivity-enhancing layoffs that happen within a social structure that does little to ensure those laid off continue to do well. I argued [...]

Matt Yglesias has a post today explaining that the only way to increase someone’s real income is by decreasing someone else’s real income. He rightly points out that some on the left are confused about this. They tend to think about jacking up wages only in terms of the workers who got a [...]

I am tired of seeing a certain argument against the minimum wage that makes absolutely no sense. According to this argument — which Christina Romer is now guilty of making — we should not increase the minimum wage because increasing the Earned Income Tax Credit is an even better way to improve the [...]

If you watch Fox News or listen to any conservative pundits, you will hear about Reagan on an almost daily basis, usually in reference to his economic success. Generally, the liberal pundit response is very underwhelming. At worst, you get some mention of deficits (which were of course high under Reagan) and at best you [...]