So this chart happened. It looks like the Fistful of Euros model of the labour market has a serious problem, in that I can’t replicate JW Mason’s original results. The compositionally weighted ECI measure of earnings is more strongly correlated with the output gap, i.e. more cyclical, than the constant-weighted ECEC, at least for 2002-2014.…
Read More Science, dammit.Are still very much with us. Here’s a chart showing the average staff turnover in British call centres (from here). Turnover marches up in the boom, crashes in the recession, and you can even make out the doubledip. All clear so far?
Read More The political aspects of full employmentI was saying that nobody seemed to bother to check the claim that defined-contribution pensions were cheaper. Nobody but weirdos like me ever suggested the following until now: Once you account for falling wages among young workers—if you must: “the Millennials”—many mysteries of the economic behavior of young people cease to be mysterious, such as…
Read More They don’t have any money.Reader Simon Hinrichsen’s MSc thesis on the Bank of England in the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars is here. He argues that the UK paid for the war by borrowing as much as France, but on better terms, and by printing much more money, but it also succeeded in keeping inflation lower and more stable. Inflation…
Read More How transparency met total corruption and they beat NapoleonChris Dillow has a nice chart, plotting the government deficit out-turn against a forecast based on its historic relationship with unemployment, swinging off John Maynard Keynes’ remark that if you look after unemployment the budget will look after itself. As he says, the interesting bit is what happens after January 2012. Unemployment dropped sharply, but…
Read More The budget and the bogus hairdressersSo the economists are now saying that even if you made testable predictions and they came true it doesn’t mean you’re right because of, you know, quantum and catallaxy and hey What the Bleep?! Do We Know. There’s an infinity of possible universes in which I might be right, and averaging over the Gaussian copula,…
Read More In a parallel universe, I scored!Here’s an interesting idea: a version of the job guarantee, in its strong form, with decentralised implementation. Am I right in thinking this is actually very similar to the Future Jobs Fund?
Read More decentralised job guaranteeSchuller pointed out that, if the economic theories of Mises’ book Human Action really are derived by painstaking and valid deductive argument, then it should be possible to set the book out in a formal symbolic form in which all axioms, premisses, and deductions are shown formally and proven. No Austrian has ever done this……
Read More A short postCharles Murray, as far as I can make out, has dropped racism in favour of old-school reactionary elitism. It’s not that other races are inferior, any more, it’s that the race, in general, is inferior. I understand this to mean he’s realised that Gang A are no closer to the White House than they were…
Read More A novel theory of the business cycle, with an old critiqueShorter me: economists should study business more, and in an ideal world, industrial sociology, before they try to do cognitive psychology Peter Dorman at Econospeak takes issue with a Robert Frank piece about workplace safety, which has all the whoopee doo Econ-101 problems you’d expect. I think, though, that there is a really big issue…
Read More This one weird trick will improve your productivity and deliver social justice