Category Archives: Uncategorized

When the US economy was a larger share of the world economy, then access to the US market meant more. For example, World Bank statistics say that the US economy was 40% of the entire world economy in 1960, but is now about 24%. The main source of growth in the world economy for theContinue reading “When US Market Access is No Longer a Trump Card”

For anyone who can do arithmetic, it did not come as a surprise that the “baby boom generation,” born from 1946 up through the early 1960s, started turning 65 in 2010. Here’s the pattern over time of the “Daily Average Number of People Turning 65.” The jump of the boomer generation is marked. Because twoContinue reading “The Utterly Predictable Problem of Long-Run US Budget Deficits”

The Gallup Poll has been asking Americans since the 1950s whether they think that the income tax they pay is “too high” or “about right.” The figure shows the responses over time including the 2019 poll, taken in early April. (The “don’t know” and the “too low” answers are both quite small, and are notContinue reading “US Attitudes Toward Federal Taxes: A Rising Share of "About Right"”

“Between the summer of 1830 and the summer of 1832, riots swept through the English countryside. Over no more than two years, 3,000 riots broke out � by far the largest case of popular unrest in England since 1700. During the riots, rural laborers burned down farmhouses, expelled overseers of the poor and sent threateningContinue reading “The Captain Swing Riots; Workers and Threshing Machines in the 1830s”

 I’m congenitally suspicious of “this time is different” arguments, which often seem very quick to toss out historical experience for the sake of a lively narrative. So when I find myself in discussions of  whether the present wave of technological change is unprecedented or unique, I often end up making the argument that while theContinue reading “Building Worker Skills in a Time of Rapid Technological Change”

David A. Price interviews R. Preston McAfee in the most recent issue of Econ Focus from the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond (Fourth Quarter 2018, pp. 18-23). From the introduction to the interview: “Following a quarter-century career in academia at the California Institute of Technology, the University of Texas, and other universities, McAfee was amongContinue reading “Interview with Preston McAfee: Economists and Tech Companies”

A substantial amount of the discussion of international trade issues starts from the premise that the United States has huge trade deficits and China has huge trade surpluses. But what if only half of that premise is true? Here are a couple of tables on trade balances that I’ve clipped out of the IMF’s WorldContinue reading “Snapshots of Trade Imbalances: US in Global Context”

Every intro statistics class teaches “correlation is not causation”–that is, because two patterns consistently move together (or consistently opposite), you can’t jump to a conclusion that A causes B, B causes A, some alternative factor C is affecting both A and B, or that among all the millions of possible patterns you can put side-by-side,Continue reading “Have the Identification Police Become Overly Intrusive?”

Here’s China’s share of world population and the global economy since the start of its economic reforms. Since 1978, China’s share of world population has declined mildly from 23% to about 19%. In those same 40 yeas, China’s share of world GDP has risen dramatically from 3% to about 20% Here’s a sens of thisContinue reading “Four Snapshots of China’s Growth and Inequality”

Daniel Kahneman (Nobel 2002) is of course known for his extensive work on behavioral biases and how they affect economic decisions. He’s now working on a new book, together with Olivier Sibony and Cass Sunstein, in which he focuses instead on the concept of “noise,” and argues that  Here’s a pr�cis of Kahneman’s current thinking on thisContinue reading “"Bias Has Been Overestimated at the Expense of Noise:" Daniel Kahneman”