Category Nick Rowe
Why “saving” should be abolished
I mean the concept, not the activity. Because it's the most confusing concept in macroeconomics.
The slow speed of recovery, PSST, plucking, and skewed news
Judging by output, employment, and unemployment, the Canadian economy hit bottom around the middle of 2009. Two and a half years later, output, employment and unemployment have recovered a lot. But like most observers I believe, and certainly hope, that we have not yet had a full recovery to the long run sustainable path. Why […]
Bob Murphy plays with the debt burden
I don't normally do blog posts with just a link to someone else's blog post. We aren't that sort of blog. But I'm going to make an exception in this case. Bob Murphy's latest post on the burden of the debt is very clear, very comprehensive on both sides of the debate, and very funny. […]
Steve Landsburg goes “meta” on me
Steve Landsburg has what I think is the best response so far to my "Debt is too a burden on our children unless you believe in Ricardian Equivalence" post. [Update: I strongly recommend Steve's latest post, which puts everything together.] Steve says "I want to explain what [Nick] means, and why it’s wrong." But he […]
Matt Yglesias, spilt milk, and the debt burden
I visit Matt Yglesias' house (HT JeffreyY). I drink one litre of milk from his fridge. I write Matt an IOU for one litre of milk. 1. If Matt subsequently tears up that IOU, then I am richer and he is poorer. Taking the two of us together, in aggregate we are neither richer nor […]
The 30 years non-war over the debt burden. Plus Samuelsonian NGDP bonds.
I thought we all had this debt burden stuff sorted out 30 years ago. Obviously we didn't. We should have had a bigger argument about it 30 years ago, which would have sorted it all out. But we didn't. Maybe because we spent all our time arguing about other stuff 30 years ago, and didn't […]
Canadian Economic Forecasts: 2011 revisited
Happy New Year everyone! Last January we made forecasts for 2011. It's now time to check how well we did. (I will do a separate post for 2012 forecasts). Well, we all did badly. Even those of us who got some numbers roughly right got other numbers badly wrong. I think that shows that 2011 […]
Debt is too a burden on our children (unless you believe in Ricardian Equivalence)
So, I was out there shovelling snow, thinking about writing a post on the burden of the debt on future generations. And about how macroeconomists' beliefs on this question had silently shifted about 30 years ago, and about how we as a profession have engaged in a sort of "memory falsification" (like Timur Kuran's concept […]
The Trade Cycle; why I=S is a bad place to start doing macro.
In the olden days, economists used to talk about the trade cycle. (They meant a cycle in the amount of all trade, not just international trade). They meant a cycle in the amount of exchange. There are fluctuations over time in the amount of buying and selling that people do. In a boom, trade speeds […]
Why Y? A disproof of Keynesian macroeconomics?
There's something really wrong with the way we do short run macroeconomics. We focus all our attention on the output of newly-produced goods and services. That's what we call "Y". We talk about Aggregate Demand and Aggregate Supply, and what we mean by AD and AS is the demand and supply of those same newly-produced […]
Worthwhile Canadian Initiative 
Recent Comments