“Okun’s Law” suggests that if the economy doesn’t grow about 2.5 percent per year, then the unemployment rate will rise. As Jared Bernstein pointed out Thursday, Moody’s forecasts US GDP growth at only 1.7 percent for 2011. If Okun’s Law holds, we’re headed for higher not lower unemployment in early 2012. Jared’s post focuses on […]
MW emailed me about the same New York Times piece I commented on in my preceding post. He focuses, though, on the sentence that he thinks should have been the lede: A wide range of economists say the administration should call for a new round of stimulus spending, as prescribed by mainstream economic theory, to […]
According to today’s New York Times, the President’s economic and political advisors are squabbling over the economy. One side favors only advocating economic policies that have a chance to pass in Congress (“[t]hese include free trade agreements and improved patent protections for inventors”). The other side wants the president to tap into public anger over the […]
The Wall Street Journal’s David Wessel has a good column arguing that the US business model is broken. According to Wessel: Two big sectors of the U.S. economy have been on steroids: finance and health care. If anything is crowding out more productive activities, it’s them, as Mr. Romer argued in a recent National Academy […]
