24. Nash Equilibrium/Stackelberg Competition
23. The Production Function
22. Pareto Optimality
21. The Phillips Curve
20. The Gauss–Markov theorem
19. Hysteresis
18. Say's Law
17. The Lucas critique
16. Theory of the Firm
15. Quantity theory of money
14. Keynesian Stabilization
"How do conditions compare locally to when the Reagan administration was asking for a second term. Statistically, have we seen the same kind of recovery from the 2007-to-2009 recession as we did from the 1980-to-1982 recession? Not to ruin the suspense, but the charts below suggest the answer is 'no.' The Miami area enjoyed a much more robust recovery at the end of the Reagan first term than it has under the Obama first term." —Well, there you have it then.
Taller people are smarter than you, so they deserve more money. They are also probably more attractive.
Sure, it was basically a glorified ad for the author's overly precious personal-finance site, but that doesn't mean that Alexa von Tobel's recent Huffington Post piece on living in New York City on $0 a day wasn't offensive and dumb. Von Tobel's giggly guide to keeping it real could have been retitled "The Well-Off Person's Guide To Playing Pauper For A Day" — the hold-on-to-your-wallets flip side of all the "aspirational" dreck that clogs too much media even to this day. She walked to work, which just happens to be a mere 20-minute hike from her apartment, instead of taking a cab! She gave up Le Pain lattes [...]
Even Nikki Finke is a neo-Marxist Keynesian hybrid up in her economic thinkings! "According to BoxOffice.com, 2009's domestic cume has already topped 2008's record haul of $9.626 million from January 1 to December 31, 2008," she writes today, asking: "So Why Is Most Of Hollywood Out Of Work?" You know why, girlfriend! All over America, it's easy to figure out this year that you can pay one person to do the work of two or three. Even best boys.
A spot about a father suffering from Alzheimer's is the most popular of a new series of ads that has young people on China's social networks talking—or better put, it has them talking about crying. "Every time I see it I cry," writes one Weibo user. Hers is a typical reaction. Filial piety might seem a laughable topic for a public-service campaign in the west, but in China, it's the basis for a campaign aimed to guilt kids into thinking about the elderly. Making China's youth cry is not enough, though; China needs the new generation to act on that guilt, to buy into the Confucian ideal [...]
The Times and a host of other publications heralded last week's new study extolling the lifelong money-earning benefits of having a good primary/middle-school teacher. Oh, yay! Let's do what these economists from the National Bureau of Economic Research suggest, right?
Actually, ugh, no. What economists Raj Chetty and John N. Friedman of Harvard and Jonah Rockoff of Columbia want to do, apparently, is to identify and fire "weaker" teachers, for the sake of a barely perceptible increase in students' "lifetime income." Nobody has actually tried this yet; the report doesn't describe an experiment. It's just the conclusion they draw from their analysis of massive amounts [...]
The 1970s began in late 1973 and ended in early 1982. A decade-long hangover. The childish joie de vivre of flower power had faded by 1973, five or six years after the Summer of Love, three years after the breakup of The Beatles. The bloom was off the rose and a kind of cynical sense of entitlement had set in. To be cool in 1973 you needed to live in a squat (preferably in The Smoke, as we called London in those days), go on the dole and wear an Afghan coat. Brightly colored underwear was still OK, but the important thing was to be weary and [...]
Rest easy, America! After our long march through the spiritless battle to prop up our inflammable paper economy, David Brooks has identified the true cause of our distemper: we have been lulled into a terminal state of civic distrust by an overly porous power elite.
Yes. The recruitment of our upper-class leaders has become more demographically open, Brooks notes, with the old WASP establishment giving way to a "meritocratic" scrum of other-than white male power brokers. And as a result, "we've changed the criteria for success. It is less important to be clubbable. It is more important to be smart and hard-working." But there's a twist! "As [...]
In this glorious 3rd quarter of the year, something rather amazing has happened. Overall, companies reported that "worker productivity" was up by 9.5% while actual hours worked was down 5%. This means exactly what you think it means. Mostly it means that there is no reason for companies to do any hiring. Why? Because they are doing just fine without you.
"In Berkeley, we are addicted to high taxes—in the 25 years I’ve lived here, I can’t even count how many times I and my fellow citizens have said a resounding yes to yet another tax hike or bond measure. Two weeks ago, I got my money’s worth."
Would you like to play get the economist? Reading Chicago economics prof Casey Mulligan trying to make sense of job losses in the recession is fun for everyone.
It's this kind of fun: "Payroll spending now exceeds what it was when the recession began, yet employment remains millions lower. Apparently, payroll spending is not enough to bring those jobs back." Hmm, if only I could find a model that accounts for that! Is there any conceivable reason that there would be fewer people making, all told, more money in America today?
This is what happens when people start working with pure numbers: real-world motivations stop making [...]
"[Minnesota] Republican gubernatorial candidate Rep. Tom Emmer said the state could gain jobs if employers could a pay a lower hourly wage to employees who earn a lot of money from tips." -Sure. It's a plan?
Yesterday's defeat of a gay marriage bill in the New Jersey Senate is just one more disappointment in a string of bitter losses for those who seek equal justice under the law. Sure, other countries don't seem to have a problem making fairness legal, but here at home, at the state level, we have apparently decided that we're not going to play along. Many of the objections you hear center around religion, but the sorry undercurrent behind the unwillingness to grant the same rights to homosexuals that their fellow citizens already enjoy and frequently abuse is actually one concerning politics and economics, i.e., in These Troubled Times legislators [...]
"New Frontier Bank was chartered in a double-wide trailer in 1998. Founder Larry Seastrom raised capital by selling shares – at $10 apiece – to 181 friends and neighbors. As the bank grew, the shares soared in value, reaching $110 at their peak in 2006. Now, the bank has been shut down and the shares are worthless."
