Following a Twitter debate involving myself, Gabe Mathy, Pseudoerasmus, and Anton Howes on the theory that high wages in England induced labor-saving technologies and led to the Industrial Revolution, I thought [ … ]

In my last post I described the ‘type’ characteristics of Trump political legitimacy, he has popular appeal, a form of charisma, a power that will giveth and taketh away. It’s [ … ]

There are three types of legitimacy for political leadership: Hereditary power based on family. Son of the king becomes king. If the son of a great king is a loser, [ … ]

Noah Smith asks about the literature on the real exchange rate (RER) and trade. My own main line of research is about RERs and manufacturing (also here on workers), RER measurement, and [ … ]

1000 pic = 1000 words…

As a society crumbles, as bitter divisions grow and disorder spreads and nothing seems to work, anger comes and people begin to want a man who will say “Enough!” and [ … ]

Via Adam Tooze on Twitter.  The picture quality is poor, but here it is below. The US in fact has fewer robots than Germany and Japan, and yet manufacturing employment [ … ]

Jon Hartley, writing in Forbes, offers a great graph of the overnight Federal Funds rate, This graph  mirrors nicely the graph I posted last week, from “Deviations from Covered Interest Rate Parity” [ … ]

At times South Park is elegant, it questions and answers. And it’s funny. Please watch the video. Laugh… 1 video = 10,000 words (takes a few seconds to load) https://www.adamtownsend.me/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Choose-Government-or-Religion.mp4

Tomorrow’s lecture is, in part, covering a homework on the Great Depression in which the students were asked to redo some of a classic Bernanke and James article on the [ … ]