Clik here to view.
"Disruption" disrupted
At The Atlantic, Justin Fox compares the popular obsession with "disruption" to findings from research on declining dynamism, including papers I've been on. Nowadays every corporate executive wants to...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Bad arguments against Uber
This note by Catherine Rampell makes a pretty odd argument that Uber is bad for consumers. For example: Medallions and other regulations capping the number of livery cars available are often derided as...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Does SBA lending reduce growth?
Salim Furth directs me to a new working paper on Small Business Administration loans and income growth: Conventional wisdom suggests that small businesses are innovative engines of Schumpetarian...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Charlie Munger on firm dynamics (and Piketty)
From the Daily Journal meeting: If you take the whole history of businesses that make a fair amount of money and have a little surplus but their basic business goes to hell based on technological...
View ArticleClik here to view.
"Few other places to turn"
Storyline is probably my favorite of the new websites this year (after Clickhole, of course; and 538 puts out awesome stuff too). Here's a great story about rent-to-own culture by Chico Harlan. And yet...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Articulating my confusion
Here's a paragraph from a note by Neil Irwin, one of my favorite econ journalists (read his book): The story goes like this: The wealthy tend to save a large proportion of their income, whereas middle...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Updated "A Model of Secular Stagnation"
Eggertsson and Mehrotra have released their secular stagnation paper at NBER, and since the last draft they have made a lot of progress. I will look at it more when I get some time, but given my...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Homeownership and student debt
I really like this article on student debt and homeownership because it covers a few things that I think about often. Soft entry-level housing demand has fanned fears that rising student loan burdens...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Business opinion and the representative firm
Here's Paul Krugman: Business leaders often give remarkably bad economic advice. . . . Success in business does not seem to convey any special insight into economic policy. . . . National economic...
View ArticleClik here to view.
BED: 6.9 million jobs created, 6.5 million destroyed in Q1 2014
This is not a great report. From the BLS: From December 2013 to March 2014, gross job gains from opening and expanding private sector establishments were 6.9 million, a decrease of 440,000 jobs from...
View ArticleClik here to view.
My five favorite books of 2014
image source Here are 2013 and 2012. As usual I will limit myself to books that were published somewhat recently. My favorites, in no order: 1. Dam Nation, Stephen Grace (2012). This book is truly...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Feynman on living standards
I started to say that the idea of distributing everything evenly is based on a theory that there's only X amount of stuff in the world. . . . But this theory doesn't take into account the real reason...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Tabarrok on business dynamism
Last week's Cato growth forum included a session on declining business dynamism, which included presentations by John Haltiwanger, Amar Bhide, and Alex Tabarrok. Alex focused on the question of whether...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Pledgeable Vanguard accounts
When I see houses, I see collateral. It's good for regular people to have access to some good collateral. Without good collateral, it's very costly to respond to income shocks, emergency spending...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Depreciation
All things on earth only exist in different stages of becoming garbage. This is from Jerry Seinfeld, full routine below.
View ArticleClik here to view.
Smith on non-expert macro opinion
Noah Smith, responding to a post by Scott Sumner, suggests three reasons that non-economists are so fond of confidently entering the macro debate. They are (1) macro's relevance to regular people, (2)...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The early retirement movement
Many times on Twitter I have revealed that I am a huge fan of Mr. Money Mustache, profiled here and a million other places. For the unfamiliar, MMM is part of a movement ("early retirement extreme," or...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Articulating my confusion: Shareholders vs. the real economy
Here's an article by Lydia DePillis based on a study by J.W. Mason. Excerpt: The years since the recession have given firms even more of an incentive to dispense cash rather than invest in growth: The...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Straightening deck chairs during the "retirement crisis"
Here's Eduardo Porter: On average, a typical working family in the anteroom of retirement — headed by somebody 55 to 64 years old — has only about $104,000 in retirement savings, according to the...
View ArticleClik here to view.
My job market
This year I have been wrapping up my PhD at the University of Maryland, so I went on the infamous econ job market. I have a post about that experience that I'll put up later. For now I'll just announce...
View Article