Perry Metzger has an amusing post about Piketty and the “Shoe Event Horizon” from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: On Frogstar B, for a time shoe production increased faster than the rate of overall economic growth. As a result, … Continue reading
Never, ever, listen to or hire someone who speaks like this: It turns out we know more about economic policy than we think we do. Much (certainly not all) of contemporary economics has a pretty good idea of how the … Continue reading
Suggests what you might call the textbook result: The hike in the minimum wage thus appears to have raised the wage for low-skilled workers but made it harder for them to find jobs. Full paper here. From the summary: …because we … Continue reading
The article discussed here suggests it was related to the crisis: The common element appears to be the global financial crisis, which affected economic activity and governments’ capacity to finance continued health care spending growth. On the other hand, the … Continue reading
Poverty and global inequality are falling. (and perhaps faster than traditional studies indicate) I’ve made this point a few times. The best summary was on Vox EU. In an article called Parametric estimations of the world distribution of income. World … Continue reading
Very good quotations, first from Brink Lindsey: The fundamental problem is that equating order with top-down control retains a powerful intuitive appeal. Despite the obvious successes of unplanned markets, despite the spectacular rise of the Internet’s decentralized order, and despite … Continue reading
In an earlier post I argued that the Financial Aid process is a private progressive pricing mechanism. Here is Evan Soltas arguing an equivalent point: What has happened is a shift toward price discrimination — offering multiple prices for the … Continue reading
I had not quite realized how few households pundits are talking about. I’ve railed against exhibits like this one, because they are used by people who don’t distinguish between the 1%, the 0.1% and the ridiculous 0.01% in the graph: … Continue reading
The NYT comes through with a terrific set of interactive graphics on the tax burden over time. Some of the series are subject to the same analytical shortcomings I’ve discussed elsewhere, but they’ve laid data out in a really appealing … Continue reading
In my prior link compendium, the middle section of the post listed my prior beliefs about taxes and inequality. I’m going to separate and refine them here. As you can tell, I’ve already done a fair amount of reading on … Continue reading