Brad DeLong may seem to be hyperventilating in this post, but he is on to something. Second Gilded Age Cultural Studies Watch, or O Michael Berube! Thou Shouldst Be Blogging in This Hour! In a Super Bowl commercial–a commercial that I thought was astonishing for a company that is in the process of a slow-motion […]
Read more...A peculiar story in the Financial Times today, and I have not yet been able to locate the underlying data: Economic opportunity grew more slowly for the average American household than for either the upper or lower end of the income scale over the past two decades, according to an index compiled by Hope Street, […]
Read more...This excellent post in Barry Ritzholtz’s The Big Picture was prompted in part by Alan Abelson’s article, “Spendthrift Nation,” in today’s Barron’s. The key point is that consumers spent more than they made for two years running, 2005 and 2006. The last time this happened was in the depths of the Depression. Yesterday, DF asked […]
Read more...A bit of a mouthful, but the very important point of this Congressional Budget Office report, which was summarized in Congressional testimony and reported in Mark Thoma’s Economist’s View, is that while the growth rate of the economy has become steadier, the volatility of individual incomes has increased considerably. This income instability is another element […]
Read more...OK, so it was only a speech by the president of the New York Fed, Tim Geithner, to the Council on Foreign Relations. But the disparity in reporting between the Financial Times, both in placement and content, and the Wall Street Journal (and to some degree Bloomberg) is striking. Not surprisingly, the WSJ downplayed the […]
Read more...I normally have a great deal of respect for the Economist, but we have the occasional exception: While browsing an Upper West Side book store I could not help but notice the large number of books written on the on the plight of the middle class. The books all contain accounts of middle aged, college […]
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