Occupation: Economist Birth: February 28, 1953
Most work in macroeconomics in the past 30 years has been useless at best and harmful at worst..
People respond to incentives. If unemployment becomes more attractive because of the unemployment benefit, some unemployed workers may no longer try….
we should reject the attempt to divert the national conversation away from soaring inequality toward the alleged moral failings of those Americans be….
One way in which Americans have always been exceptional has been in our support for education. First we took the lead in universal primary education;….
But Wall Street people are in fact very smart; they're funny, they're not company men who work their way up the chain..
What our economy needs is direct job creation by the government and mortgage-debt relief for stressed consumers. What it very much does not need is a….
If the price of everything is going down, that's going to include wages as well. People will have an incentive to sit on their cash and not spend it..
We have a lot of evidence on what happens when you raise the minimum wage. And the evidence is overwhelmingly positive: Hiking the minimum wage has l….
...academic credentials are neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for having your ideas taken seriously. If a famous professor repeatedly sa….
There has been plenty to criticize about President Obama’s handling of the economy. Yet the overriding story of the past few years is not Mr. Obama’s….
The economic expansion that began in 2001, while it has been great for corporate profits, has yet to produce any significant gains for ordinary worki….
Sometimes economists in official positions give bad advice; sometimes they give very, very bad advice; and sometimes they work at the OECD..
We know that advanced economies with stable governments that borrow in their own currency are capable of running up very high levels of debt without ….
A snarky but accurate description of monetary policy over the past five years is that the Federal Reserve successfully replaced the technology bubble….
[The US] budget is dominated by the retirement programs, Social Security and Medicare - loosely speaking, the post-cold-war federal government is a b….
Every once in a while I feel despair over the fate of the planet. If you’ve been following climate science, you know what I mean: the sense that we’r….
The United States in particular and the West in general should be feeling a little embarrassed about all that lecturing we did to the Third World..
It has been obvious all along, to anyone paying attention, that the politicians shouting loudest about deficits are actually using deficit hysteria a….
Tax cuts were not going to be effective at creating jobs, and the job creation record is lousy..
It should be possible to emphasize to students that the level of employment is a macroeconomic issue, depending in the short run on aggregate demand….
I'm especially baffled by the idea of taking insurance against a U.S. default. If America defaults, we're talking about a chaotic world - Mad Max, mo….