Category: Economics

Yesterday, Suzy Khimm of Wonkblog had a post about some of the difficulties involved in cross-country comparisons of youth economic woes. Generally, people refer to headline numbers about youth unemployment, but that is not as meaningful a number as it might first appear. Different countries have different percentages of individuals in higher education and vocational… Continue reading The best way to measure “wasted youth”

With the official unemployment rate still at 8% and current rates of job additions indicating that we will remain well below full employment for some time, it is easy to get despondent. You look at the above graph and you see just 6 years ago we had less than 5% unemployment. What happened? It wasn’t… Continue reading A little inspiration from John Maynard Keynes

Positional advantages are, by definition, unscalable. That is, if all X does is improve your position relative to others, then everyone doing X wont improve everyone’s position relative to others. That’s a bit abstract, so consider some examples. Once upon a time, I went to an orientation for college. When incoming students asked existing students… Continue reading The error almost everyone makes about individual economic advancement

Gavin Mueller has a great article in the summer issue of Jacobin Magazine about piracy, and at one point drops this jaw-dropping statistic: “Intellectual property makes up 80 percent of the net worth of US corporations and 60 percent of their exports.” I ran the statistic down and found that it apparently originated from an… Continue reading Corporations are primarily intellectual property rentiers

Most right-wing economic policy arguments are really bad. The idea, for instance, that regulatory burdens and uncertainty are responsible for the bad economy — instead of the housing crisis, financial crisis, and debt overhang — is on its face absurd. But if you dig past the talking points far enough, you can actually find some… Continue reading Countering the right-wing arguments about investment