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Jason Welker

Economic View - A Dose of Skepticism on Government Spending - NYTimes.com - 5 views

  • the centerpiece is likely to be a huge increase in government spending
  • John Maynard Keynes
  • A main focus was how to avoid, or at least mitigate, the recurring slumps in economic activity.
  • ...17 more annotations...
  • Economic downturns, Mr. Keynes and Mr. Samuelson taught us, occur when the aggregate demand for goods and services is insufficient.
  • Higher consumer spending expands aggregate demand further, raising the G.D.P. yet again. And so on. This positive feedback loop is called the multiplier effect.
  • these Keynesian prescriptions make avoiding depressions seem too easy.
  • each dollar of government spending can increase the nation’s gross domestic product by more than a dollar
  • The solution, they said, was for the government to provide demand when the private sector would not.
  • less than a third of the increase takes the form of private consumption and investment.
  • Professor Ramey estimates that each dollar of government spending increases the G.D.P. by only 1.4 dollars.
  • In practice, however, the multiplier for government spending is not very large
  • If you hire your neighbor for $100 to dig a hole in your backyard and then fill it up, and he hires you to do the same in his yard, the government statisticians report that things are improving.
  • it is unlikely that, having wasted all that time digging and filling, either of you is better off.
  • inefficient spending
  • bridges to nowhere,
  • increase in economic well-being.
  • a rigorous cost-benefit analysis of each government project.
  • To this day, we have yet to come to grips with how to pay for all that the government created during that era
  • a temporary crisis as a pretense for engineering a permanent increase in the size and scope of the government. Believers in limited government have reason to be wary.
  • tax cuts will be a larger piece of the Obama recovery plan than was previously expected.
matthew_nogrady

On the Wrong Side of Globalization - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • In general, trade deals today are markedly different from those made in the decades following World War II, when negotiations focused on lowering tariffs.
  • Today, the purpose of trade agreements is different. Tariffs around the world are already low. The focus has shifted to “nontariff barriers,” and the most important of these — for the corporate interests pushing agreements — are regulations. Huge multinational corporations complain that inconsistent regulations make business costly. But most of the regulations, even if they are imperfect, are there for a reason: to protect workers, consumers, the economy and the environment.
  • recent trade agreements are reminiscent of the Opium Wars, in which Western powers successfully demanded that China keep itself open to opium because they saw it as vital in correcting what otherwise would be a large trade imbalance.
Bret Willhoit

Because Every Country Is The Best At Something - 17 views

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    Useful chart to demonstrate Specialization and how every country is good at something.  
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    It is very interesting. I posted on my blog at http://valuingeconomics.blogspot.com on Thursday. As I said there, I'm not sure some of those "specializations" are something a country would necessarily be proud of - or something they could "trade." But it is a good example of how every country is "good" at something.
Jason Welker

Another Mankiw problem for the motivated Micro student! | Welker's Wikinomics Blog - 2 views

  • Harvard’s Greg Mankiw just keep them coming! Here’s another micro problem from the esteemed professor and textbook author’s blog. Several readers enjoyed challenging themselves with his last Micro problem, so I will re-publish Mankiw’s test question here to see if people can solve it in the comment section on this blog (sorry Professor Mankiw, you have comments turned off on your blog, so how are your readers to know if they have solved it correctly?)
  • The town of Wiknam has 5 residents whose only activity is producing and consuming fish. They produce fish in two ways. Each person who works on a fish farm raises 2 fish per day. Each person who goes fishing in the town lake catches X fish per day. X depends on N, the number of residents fishing in the lake. In particular, X = 6 – N. Each resident is attracted to the job that pays more fish. a. Why do you suppose that X, the productivity of each fisherman, falls as N, the number of fishermen, rises? What economic term would you use to describe the fish in the town lake? Would the same description apply to the fish from the farms? Explain. b. The town’s Freedom Party thinks every individual should have the right to choose between fishing in the lake and farming without government interference. Under its policy, how many of the residents would fish in the lake and how many would work on fish farms? How many fish are produced? c. The town’s Efficiency Party thinks Wiknam should produce as many fish as it can. To achieve this goal, how many of the residents should fish in the lake and how many should work on the farms? (Hint: Create a table that shows the number of fish produced—on farms, from the lake, and in total—for each N from 0 to 5.) d. The Efficiency Party proposes achieving its goal by taxing each person fishing in the lake by an amount equal to T fish per day and distributing the proceeds equally among all Wiknam residents. Calculate the value of T that would yield the outcome you derived in part (c).
  • e. Compared with the Freedom Party’s hands-off policy, who benefits and who loses from the imposition of the Efficiency Party’s fishing tax?
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    Okay, this time I want to get in on the action before all you smart people get this one right on your first try again! I will offer my answers, but withhold the explanations for further discussion once other people have had a chance to chime in. a) Productivity of additional fishermen falls on the lake due to the law of diminishing marginal returns. Fish farmers would not experience diminishing returns, since each farmer is given access to additional land (or in this case water) and capital, assuming each farmer has his own farm. On the lake, labor is the only variable resource. On farms, land and capital vary with labor, assuring marginal product remains constant as additional residents get into fish farming b) Without any government interference, 1 resident will farm fish, and four will fish on the lake. c) To maximize town's total output of fish, only two residents should fish on the lake, and three should farm fish. d) To yield the maximum output of fish for the town, the town should tax lake fisherman by 2 fish. T=2. e) The hands off policy would have yielded 2 fish per resident per day. The fishing tax will ultimately yield each resident 2.8 fish per day. Therefore everyone benefits. The two lake fisherman give up half their daily catch to the government, but get part of it back through the re-distributive plan. Who else has their own answers, or explanations of MY answers!!??
Susanna Pierce

India Rising - Globalization and the Middle Class . NOW on PBS - 0 views

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    I use this clip to expand on the concept of MPC/MPS and Disposable Income before developing the Aggregate Model.
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