Everyone wants an abundance of “good paying” jobs, but employers can only afford to pay employees if the work being done is profitable. What’s abundant and what’s scarce? The question matters [ … ]

Previously, I reviewed the Currency Unions and Trade Literature here, and then shared some of my students’ referee reports of a recent Glick and Rose (2016) paper here. My undergraduates [ … ]

We need to encourage honesty above optimism. Once we can speak honestly, there is a foundation for optimism. Psychoanalysis teaches that one cause of depression is repressed anger. The rising [ … ]

In today’s irreligious and indeed antireligious climate the fashion is to dismiss Christianity as crude superstition, and to babble wisely about the separation of church and state. This is unfortunate, [ … ]

A VAT (value added tax) with no other tax — no income, corporate, estate, etc. etc. etc. — is pretty much the economists’ ideal. But how do you make it [ … ]

In a recent paper, Glick and Rose (2016) suggest that the Euro led to a staggering 50% increase in trade. To me, this sounded a bit dubious, particularly given my [ … ]

These are comments I gave on “Inflating away the public debt? An empirical assessment” by Jens Hilscher, Alon Aviv, and Ricardo Reis at the Becker-Friedman Institute Government Debt: Constraints and [ … ]

Time-travel thriller about a man living in 2013 tweeting desperate warnings to his 2017 self who has become President

Former US Treasury Secretary Larry Summers recently took exception to current US Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin’s views on artificial intelligence (AI) and related topics. The difference between the two seems [ … ]

Òscar Jordà, Björn Richter, Moritz Schularick, and Alan Taylor wrote a provocative What has bank capital ever done for us? at VoxEu, advertising the underlying paper Bank Capital Redux  (NBER, CEPR link here, [ … ]