Author Archives: Susann Lees

In September 2017, Amazon announced that it was planning to set up a second headquarters. It published a “Request for Proposal” that began: Amazon invites you to submit a response to this Request for Proposal (�RFP�) in conjunction with and on behalf of your metropolitan statistical area (MSA), state/province, county, city and the relevant localitiesContinue reading “What Amazon Said, What Amazon Meant”

What we now call World War I was known at the time, and for several decades afterward, simply as the “Great War.” It wasn’t until the arrival of World War II that World War I was re-christened. The Great War ended 100 years ago on November 11, 1918. Stephen Broadberry and Mark Harrison have editedContinue reading “Some Economics of World War I”

The Lancet has just published a recent set of papers from the Global Burden of Disease Study. As it notes: “The Global Burden of Disease Study (GBD) is the most comprehensive worldwide observational epidemiological study to date. It describes mortality and morbidity from major diseases, injuries and risk factors to health at global, national andContinue reading “Global Population Pyramids”

The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act was signed into law by President Trump less than a little less than year ago, on December 22, 2017. What are the likely benefits and costs associated with the legislation? The Fall 2018 issue of the Journal of Economic Perspectives (where I work as Managing Editor) includes a two-paperContinue reading “The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, One Year Later”

Traditional monetary policy, as practiced in the decades up to 2007, faces a problem looking ahead. The shared areas in this figure show recessions.  During a typical recession, the Federal Reserve cut its policy target interest rates–the so-called federal funds rate–by about 5 percentage points. But it looks as if the step-by-step rise in thisContinue reading “Why Quantitative Easing Will Return”

A trivia question for this US election day. What do the following 21 countries have in common? ArgentinaAustraliaBelgiumBolivia BrazilCosta RicaDemocratic Republic of the CongoDominican RepublicEcuadorEgyptGreeceHondurasNorth KoreaLuxembourgMexicoNauruParaguayPeruSingaporeThailandUruguay According to the CIA World Factbook 2017, these are the countries of the world that have compulsory voting. I‘m not in favor of compulsory voting, but for elections heldContinue reading “Where Voting is Mandatory”

My current office sits near the anthropologists, who have posted this comment from Clifford Geertz on the departmental bulletin board. It appears near the end of the “Introduction” to his 1983 collection of essays, Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretative Anthropology. Geertz wrote: To see ourselves as others see us can be eye-opening. To seeContinue reading “Clifford Geertz and Radical Objectivity”

One of my pet peeves about arguments over the role of money in elections is that the discussion usually focuses so heavily on campaign contributions, while leaving out other intersections of money in politics–like the role of lobbying. To illustrate, here’s data on the total cost of elections to the candidates from the ever-useful CenterContinue reading “Lobbying vs. Campaign Spending”

It is a truth universally acknowledged that arguing about the definitions of terms like “capitalism” and “socialism” is a waste of time. So rather than argue, I will simply assert that the world has many flavors of capitalism: among them, US/British, Japanese, Scandinavian/northern European, German, Spanish/French/Italian southern European, and doubtless others. Within the United States,Continue reading “The Scandinavian Style of Capitalism”

I was hired back in 1986 to be the Managing Editor for a new academic economics journal, at the time unnamed, but which soon launched as the Journal of Economic Perspectives. The JEP is published by the American Economic Association, which back in 2011 decided–to my delight–that it would be freely available on-line, from theContinue reading “Fall 2018 Journal of Economic Perspectives Available On-line”