Bruce Sacerdote‘s NBER Working Paper, “Fifty Years of Growth in American Consumption, Income, and Wages” provides a nice update on the measurement of CPI Bias. The punchline should be obvious, but it’s great to hear such an eminent economist say it: “Meaningful growth in consumption for below median income families has occurred even in a prolonged period of increasing income inequality, increasing consumption inequality and a decreasing share of national income accruing to labor.”
Tag: wealth
The Great Successor: Inside North Korea
I highly recommend Anna Fifield’s The Great Successor. It’s full of information about not only the life of Kim Jong Un, but what’s happened inside North Korea since his ascent to the Red Throne. Most readers will be shocked by her description of the North Korean hell-state, but that’s all old hat to me.
Is There a Market for an ISA Marketplace?
There is so much that could be done to better allocate money across time slices to get capital to its highest time value location for individuals. When you need money isn’t always when you have it and vice versa. I’ve blogged before about a world where you can sell shares in yourself and securitize your future potential wealth.
Codifying Our Worst Impulses: The Ideas that Started World War II
Today (9/1) is the 80th anniversary of the start of World War II, the deadliest violent conflict in human history. Death tolls vary, but often reach 80 million souls. What caused it? Lists of proximate causes never end, but the only credible “root cause” is simply: ideas.
Dominance: Material vs. Rhetorical
Do the rich dominate our society? In one sense, they obviously do. Rich people run most of the business world, own most of the wealth, and are vastly more likely to be powerful politicians. In another sense, however, the rich aren’t dominant at all. If you get in public and loudly say, “Rich people are great. We owe them everything. They deserve every penny they’ve got – and more. People who criticize the rich are just jealous failures,” almost everyone will recoil in horror.
Sneering at “Conspiracy Theories” is a Lazy Substitute for Seeking the Truth
After three years of continuously beating the drum for its own now-discredited conspiracy theory — that the President of the United States conspired with Vladimir Putin’s regime to rig the 2016 presidential election — the Times doesn’t have much standing to whine about, or sneer at, “conspiracy theories and hyperpartisanship.”
Work is Better for Kids than School
In the US, children are forced to labor at a desk in cinder block rooms for 13 years. It is mandatory and very difficult to escape. They have no choice over the work or the schedule. They earn no pay. They gain few skills that are valuable later in life. They are shamed and punished if they don’t enjoy it, aren’t good at it, or slack.
Power, Not Policy, Drives American Politics
According to the late political philosopher Anthony de Jasay, the modern state is a “redistributive drudge …. If its ends are such that they can be attained by devoting its subjects’ resources to its own purposes, its rational course is to maximize its discretionary power over these resources. In the ungrateful role of drudge, however, it uses all its power to stay in power, and has no discretionary power left over.” How much discretionary power does the federal government exercise over your resources?
Did Jeffrey Epstein “Belong to Intelligence?”
Since World War Two, the United States has built itself into a “national security state” which recognizes no ethical or legal constraints. It’s doesn’t exist to protect the American public. It exists to protect itself. And, too often, it protects the predators among us.
Monetize Your Anger
Critics of the economics profession often accuse us of “knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing.” But economists also often antagonize a far larger group – ordinary people who barely realize our profession even exists. How? By asking about Willingness To Pay (WTP).