I tend to avoid wading into the Wal-Mart Wars, just because the aesthetic issues are so wound up with the economic ones that I find them hard to dissociate. Fortunately, Brad DeLong weighs offers up this useful guideline:
I suggest a convergence on a simple position: efficient production and distribution, good; using local monopoly power […]
Last night, Greater Boston had on Patricia Aburdene, author of MegaTrends 2010. She came across as some strange cross between Suzie Orman and Hernando de Soto. At one point she said "I love the fact that Starbucks spends more on health care for its companies than it does on coffee." Which to me just indicates […]
Nick of Electoral Math writes about the "Grocery Store Conundrum", the tendency for low-income city neighborhoods to see fewer supermarkets and higher food prices than middle- and high-income neighborhoods.
Why don’t market forces put as much downward pressure on the price of food in lower-income neighborhoods as they do in middle income and upper-middle-income neighborhoods?
…My […]
I’ve written a bit on the housing bubble here, and why, if anything, it’s more a macroeconomic danger than anything else. But there’s a greater, more easily identifiable problem: our currently low savings rate. Kash at Angry Bear considers capital flows and savings behavior and provides a useful chart comparing the savings rate of several […]
If you’re not reading Daniel Gross’s weblog, you should. Like his articles in Slate, it’s fun and substantial at the same time. I particularly like his criticisms (here and here) of shoddy business journalism.
I see Steve Lansburg’s point about vine tomatoes - that in explaining the price differential between tomatoes sold on the vine and those picked off the vine, you can’t simply talk about the reasons for a demand differential but also have to talk about why suppliers don’t rush in to fill demand. But the hubris […]
Ooh, this one is a delightfully obvious headline: Doctoral Thesis Says Rich People Spend More on Conspicuous Things
I realize that economics can sometimes lend fresh insight to sociological questions by applying a different, more quantitative, methodology. Still, if there’s something that will make a sociologically-minded person but her or his head against the wall, it […]
Over at Oxblog, David Adesnik actually goes back to Kerry and Edwards’ speeches and makes a good point. Riffing off a Josh Benson criticism of Schwarzenegger’s 8th grade civics class motif, Adesnik writes:
As OxBlog said, the [Schwarzenegger] speech was shopworn and predictable. However, all of Arnold’s talk about free enterprise made me ask, “Did Kerry […]
Here’s something I never thought I’d see: a conservative argument expressing interest in direct transfer payments (though the Earned Income Credit) over the minimum wage. But Steve Landsburg, whose columns are marked by counter-intuitive economic logic, half the time so counter-intuitive they in fact defy reality (the nadir in my mind was the one denying […]
Matt Yglesias catches the press confusing real and nominal wages in their Kerry bashing:
Damn those lying, pessimistic Democrats. Except that as the Post had to concede yesterday, Kerry’s actually right:
On June 19 we wrote that wage increases had kept pace with inflation in the year to May, and criticized Sen. John F. Kerry for […]
Go read Benjamin Wallace-Wells’ Washington Monthly article on the current housing bubble. Even more than the Economist’s survey on the topic, the piece explains the bubble, the likely economic fallout and the political dimensions in clear, readable terms.
As one of the overheated housing markets, Boston should pay special attention - currently the average home […]
From an excellent NewsHour piece on rising oil prices last night I heard John Kerry say the following:
I’ll tell you what. If the gas prices keep rising at rate they’re going now, Dick Cheney and George Bush are going to have to carpool to work.
….Number one, we should be putting pressure on OPEC to […]
The standard liberal rejoinder to the Republicans’ claim to be the free trade party is that Bush and the Congress put through steel tarriffs and agricultural subsidies on a scale that surpassed much of what the Democrats could imagine for trade protectionism. In fact, the only substantial difference in the parties’ stances is the nature […]
I don’t know how seriously people take the National Review on economic matters. But I suspect that Larry Kudlow is not that far off Republican talking points when he writes the following:
There continues to be much debate and confusion about the importance of this household survey, from which the unemployment rate is determined, and the […]
In my post yesterday on the difference between pro-business and pro-market impulses of conservative policy, I neglected an obvious point: that Democrats - or more precisely, the swath of the political spectrum that the Democrats represent - vary in the strength of their support for the market. What’s surprising about this presidential primary race so […]