Like a great many landmines left by the failures of our political establishment over recent years, there is a disaster lurking down the path, soon to be under our feet. The name of this landmine is the national debt. While it's true that historically the national debt has hardly ever been a serious issue for … Continue reading The Risk of Debt Singularity
It was predicted early in the year that COVID-19 could kill as many as 2.2 million Americans. A variety of other models showed between 1 and 2 million fatalities, and they received frontpage news coverage for days and weeks. But 9 months into this pandemic, we haven't witnessed it. Is the answer to this question, … Continue reading How 2 Million American Lives Were Saved
Kitchin cycle. Juglar cycle. Kondratiev wave. Boom-bust. A whole bunch of malarkey. I don’t think recessions are nowadays really the result of ‘cycles,’ which is a term that sort of implies they are part of some natural order of things, like moon phases or the seasons. I think recessions are like ice ages. They are … Continue reading The Evolution of the Business Cycle
In 1912, Italian statistician Corrado Gini introduced a concept (which came to take his name) called the Gini Coefficient. The coefficient, which is a measure of statistical dispersion, is used primarily to measure the level of economic inequality, such as income, wealth, and consumption inequality. This coefficient is calculated by subtracting from cumulative income in … Continue reading It’s Time To Turn the Tide in Inequality
I recently thought of a new way to measure the burden of the national debt, though I'm sure I'm not the first. When we measure the national debt, we typically take either gross federal debt, or federal debt held by the public as a share of gross domestic product. When we do that, we come … Continue reading Putting the National Debt Into Perspective
