Here are the facts behind my tweet from earlier, on a point to which Dean Baker and I both objected. In an NYT oped from this AM, columnist Bret Stephens stated, “…the economy is finally growing above the 3 percent mark.” Nope (though, otherwise, I thought Stephens made a good point about contemporary R’s prowess in ginning… Read more
Archive for the ‘Economic Growth’ Category
What’s (not) up with productivity growth? A quick overview
For a long while now, I’ve been thinking and reading about the great productivity growth slowdown, so it seemed like a good time to give the lay of the land as I see it: –Facts of the case, 1: As measured (as you’ll see, this caveat is important), since 2010, output per hour has been growing… Read more
Quick note on inflation, exchange rates, and wages
A few weeks back, I did some simple modelling of the impact of the weakening dollar on US inflation, suggesting it would boost price growth a bit, but was nothing to get wound up about. And, of course, a little more inflation would be welcomed. Researchers at Goldman Sachs took an interesting, deeper dive into… Read more
The robots aren’t coming. They’re here. And some are helpful.
In a public service to spare you from reading thousands of pages of both anecdote and analyses, here is a quick summary of the debate over whether automation is really killing jobs. Pro: Automation is killing jobs! The robots are coming! Anti: Nuh-uh. If it were, productivity growth, or output per hour of work, would… Read more
A few links: eroding norms and the limits of presidents re the economy
I’ve had a couple of WaPo posts out to which I’ve been meaning to link. This first one, on the warp speed of norm erosion in the Trump era, has the interesting feature that its shelf life was vastly shortened by the Mooch getting the bootch later in the very day I posted. Of course,… Read more