Echoes of the Great Depression: Japan
I was expecting “Japan’s lost decades” to be an easy story to tell. However, when I started researching for this post, I discovered a controversy existed on whether a lost decade … Read More
Category: Economic Issues
Ideas about how an economy works. Organized ideologies about economies go by names like Keynesianism, neoclassical economics, socialism, etc., etc.
Echoes of the Great Depression: Europe
For all of my life the nations of Europe have been very much to the left of center. I suppose this condition is the legacy of dirigisme and socialism in France, Bismarck’s … Read More
Echoes of the Great Depression: America, Europe, and Japan
Although we are technically no longer in a recession, the rate of economic growth is so low that the economy for many people seems like it is in recession. Below … Read More
Why Did the Great Depression Last So Long?
Because of the complexity of the Great Depression, there are several different ways in which you can date the beginning and ending of this immense event. Many people date the … Read More
What If They Threw a Recession and Nobody Came?
Rich Danker in the Weekly Standard writes in the guise of a book review about a favorite conservative theme: How a distressed economy in recession, left to its own devices … Read More
Beware BEPS!
The acronym BEPS stands for “Base Erosion and Profit Shifting” and the BEPS project is an effort by the OECD to study perceived flaws in international tax rules. The perception that multinational … Read More
The Keynesian- Neoclassical Ideological Conflict (2)
When we left this discussion, we had found that a Keynesian economist believes government stimulus spending must be used to kick-start (pump-prime?) the economy out of recession.
Neoclassical economists on the other hand believe care must be taken not to damage an already distressed economy further.
The Keynesian- Neoclassical Ideological Conflict (1)
Quite possibly the most consequential ideological conflict within Western nations today is the battle of economic ideas between Keynesian and neoclassical thought. Since Keynesian ideas mandate greater power and a larger … Read More
The Federal Reserve: What It Is
Flag of the Federal Reserve Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons The Federal Reserve System is one of those government organizations that most people hear about from … Read More
Economy Becoming Increasingly Ill
Yesterday the government announced its first revision of first quarter annualized GDP growth. The revision, as expected, was downward so that Q1 growth is no longer recorded as the first … Read More
Should We Fight ISIS? (2)
If we do go to war with ISIS, a large national commitment would have to be made in assets, both economic and military, to accomplish the task. Given both our historically … Read More
The Law of Marginal Utility
This is the last of the major neoclassical economic laws we must cover. It completes the basic framework of neoclassic economics around which other economic statements can be derived. See reference … Read More
Ricardo’s Law of Comparative Advantage
David Ricardo by Thomas Phillips, oil on canvas, circa 1821 Wikimedia Commons / Thomas Phillips (1770-1845) The next classical law of economics we shall investigate is Ricardo’s law of comparative … Read More
Further Thoughts on Say’s Law
After thinking on what I posted yesterday on Say’s law of markets, it seemed to me that the formulation of the law should be given some further thought. Certainly, Say himself was … Read More
Say’s Law of Markets
The next classical law we will look at is a statement that no self-respecting Keynesian would recognize as a law at all. Say’s law of markets was propounded by Jean-Baptiste … Read More
Secular Stagnation
It seems that some Keynesians, worried by the slow economic growth since we emerged from the “Great Recession” in 2009, are dusting off the old Keynesian idea of “secular stagnation.” Larry … Read More
Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand
Although it might not be immediately obvious to you, the law of supply and demand implies one of the most important functions of money. Everyone knows money serves as a … Read More
The Lessons of Europe and Wishful Thinking
The Editor-in-Chief of Forbes Media, Steve Forbes, has just indulged in some wishful thinking, which I share. The main story in the cited post is that Great Britain and mainland … Read More
The Law of Supply and Demand
The Muir portrait of the Scottish moral philosopher Adam Smith, the discoverer of the Law of Supply and Demand. Wikimedia Commons / Scottish National Gallery In this post I will … Read More
The Burden of Government Regulations
Just as we were wondering yesterday, along with Danny Vinik of the New Republic, what could be going wrong with the economy, the Competitive Enterprise Institute published its annual review … Read More
How Seriously Can We Take Economics As A Science?
Since we are going to be writing a lot about economics in this blog, we should spend some time figuring out how seriously we should take it as an authority … Read More