Changes in money wages. And what Keynes had to say then is as valid as ever: under depression-type conditions, with short-term interest rates near zero, there’s no reason to think that lower wages for all workers — as opposed to lower wages for a...

Leave your comments here on Keynes and money wages. This is Tyler, not Alex, but typepad is again not accepting comments on my posts for technical reasons. Typepad, please clear up this problem! In the meantime, you can leave your comments here.

Greg Mankiw writes my post for me. He quotes Blanchard and Perrotti, neither of whom is a follower of Milton Friedman: ...we find that both increases in taxes and increases in government spending have a strong negative effect on private investment spending. This effect is consistent with...

Writing to Peter Singer about Down syndrome. I liked this Michael Bérubé post; here is an excerpt:...in the 1920s we were told that people with Down syndrome were incapable of learning to speak; in the 1970s, we were told that people with Down syndrome were incapable of...

Advertising markets in everything. Tom Farber gives a lot of tests. He's a calculus teacher, after all. So when administrators at Rancho Bernardo, his suburban San Diego high school, announced the district was cutting spending on supplies by nearly a third, Farber had a...

Hail Garett Jones!. From the comments, Garett Jones writes:Here’s a simple neoclassical explanation for the high G (government purchases)–>Low Y (GDP) relationship: More high-paying government jobs–> More people waiting in line for those good jobs–> Less private-sector employment. Queuing for good Davis-Bacon jobs...

The Capital Strike. Roosevelt went on in later weeks to speculate that the slowdown in investment was not economically explicable but was, rather, part of a political conspiracy against him, a "capital strike" designed to dislodge him from office and destroy the New...

Joe the Plumber and his favorite books. Joe reads economics:The Theory of Money and Credit (Ludwig von Mises): "It brought monetary theory into the mainstream of economic analysis. It is important reading for these troubled times."My theory is that someone in Ron Paul's camp told him to...

Insurance markets in everything. If only. But now we have insurance in insurance:For these economically uncertain times, the UnitedHealth Group has a “first of its kind” product: the right to buy an individual health policy at some point in the future even if you...

Economists Have Abandoned Principle. The title is from Oliver Hart and Luigi Zingales writing in the WSJ:Practically every day the government launches a massively expensive new initiative to solve the problems that the last day's initiative did not. It is hard to discern any...

Assorted links. 1. Learn your divorce risk? 2. Krugman chooses the winning caption 3. An independent fiscal policy council? 4. Brad DeLong on Tyler and Mises 5. Your light cone, via RSS

Markets in everything. Police have made an arrest in an armoured car robbery in the US in which the suspect used the free online classifieds website Craigslist to hire decoys... Here is the link, courtesy of John de Palma. Elsewhere in the series,...

The AD-AS model with a vertical AD curve. Paul Krugman creates a simple model of the 1930s, based on a vertical AD curve; Greg Mankiw comments and Krugman adds some explanation. I have a few comments (under the fold)... 1. In the 1940s, Franco Modigliani showed that this...

A Lot to Lose. Ted Frank and Ray Lehmann are taking the Stickk approach to weight loss to an extreme. For every pound less than 60 (!) that Ray fails to lose in the next 9 months he has agreed to pay Ted, $1000....

Why do so many more women study abroad?. The ratio is about 2-1. And it's not just because women are concentrated in the "study abroad intensive" humanities:The National Science Foundation reports that men earn 80 percent of bachelor’s degrees in engineering. But women’s participation in a study abroad...