Welcome to the 250th Billy Blog Saturday Quiz and the 1st for 2014. The quiz tests whether you have been paying attention over the last seven days. See how you go with the following questions. Your results are only known to you and no records are retained.
I am now using Friday’s blog space to provide draft versions of the Modern Monetary Theory textbook that I am writing with my colleague and friend Randy Wray. We expect to publish the text sometime around mid-2014. Our (very incomplete) textbook homepage – Modern Monetary Theory and Practice – has draft chapters and contents etc in varying states of completion. Comments are always welcome. Note also that the text I post here is not intended to be a blog-style narrative but constitutes the drafting work I am doing – that is, the material posted will not represent the complete text. Further it will change as the drafting process evolves.
As a follow up to Monday’s blog on the US labour market – Cutting US unemployment benefits is cruel and stupid – this short blog considers the latest flows in the US to provide a fuller understanding of why it is madness to even contemplate undermining aggregate demand overall (by cutting unemployment benefits). The flows data shows that the labour market is still in recovery, albeit a very tepid recovery, and the chance of a reversal in fortunes is very high, should aggregate demand falter. The US labour market is a long way from full employment (as I demonstrated on Monday) and the underlying dynamics of the labour market which this blog is about show that it is also not very vital at present. Taken together only a stupid person would think it was sensible to deny benefits to the long-term unemployed. Their stupidity is only topped by the intensity of their socio-pathic tendencies.
The title is my current working title for a book I am finalising over the next few months on the Eurozone. If all goes well (and it should) it will be published in both Italian and English by very well-known publishers. The publication date for the Italian edition is tentatively late April to early May 2014. The book will be about 180 pages long. Given the time constraints I plan to devote most of my blog time over the next 3 months to the production of the book. I will of-course break that pattern when there is a major data release and/or some influential person says something stupid or something sensible. I hope the daily additions will be of interest to you all. A lot has to be done! Because the drafting has to be tighter than the normal stream of consciousness that forms my usual blogs, the daily quotient is likely to be shorter.
The title is my current working title for a book I am finalising over the next few months on the Eurozone. If all goes well (and it should) it will be published in both Italian and English by very well-known publishers. The publication date for the Italian edition is tentatively late April to early May 2014. The book will be about 180 pages long. Given the time constraints I plan to devote most of my blog time over the next 3 months to the production of the book. I will of-course break that pattern when there is a major data release and/or some influential person says something stupid or something sensible. I hope the daily additions will be of interest to you all. A lot has to be done! Because the drafting has to be tighter than the normal stream of consciousness that forms my usual blogs, the daily quotient is likely to be shorter. I also have some happy new year comments at the end today! But if you get bored before then – Happy New Year!
Once upon a time when I was a postgraduate student and there were around 10 unemployed for every registered vacancy in Australia a professor at my university was waxing lyrical about the lazy unemployed and what they should do to get off the welfare list. His said well “if they really wanted to work they could go down to the municipal tip and scratch together some scrap wood and some old pram wheels and build a cart, then follow the milkman around each morning and collect the horse dung and start a garden fertiliser business”. He wanted the unemployment benefit eliminated to get “these characters off their bums”. I remember the session vividly. That was his cure for the indolence of the unemployed. I put my hand up and said: “Two problems. First, the local council generally will not allow people to scour the tips for rubbish. Second, more importantly, the dairies now have trucks. The horse and cart milkmen were eliminated a few decades ago”. Much laughter followed. My relations with that professor soured a little more after that but the base (sourness) was already large so the percentage change was minimal. The same sort of idiocy is driving policy in the US at present with the US Congress enforcing more than a million unemployed Americans (that is, about 12 per cent of the total official unemployed) will lose their unemployment benefits this coming Saturday because the US politicians have decreed against all available evidence and research that this cohort is lazy and that the dole is standing between them and jobs.
Here are the answers with discussion for yesterday’s quiz. The information provided should help you work out why you missed a question or three! If you haven’t already done the Quiz from yesterday then have a go at it before you read the answers. I hope this helps you develop an understanding of modern monetary theory (MMT) and its application to macroeconomic thinking. Comments as usual welcome, especially if I have made an error.
Welcome to the Billy Blog Saturday Quiz. The quiz tests whether you have been paying attention over the last seven days. See how you go with the following questions. Your results are only known to you and no records are retained.
I am now using Friday’s blog space to provide draft versions of the Modern Monetary Theory textbook that I am writing with my colleague and friend Randy Wray. We expect to publish the text sometime around mid-2014. Our (very incomplete) textbook homepage – Modern Monetary Theory and Practice – has draft chapters and contents etc in varying states of completion. Comments are always welcome. Note also that the text I post here is not intended to be a blog-style narrative but constitutes the drafting work I am doing – that is, the material posted will not represent the complete text. Further it will change as the drafting process evolves.
Another relatively short blog today – it is holidays after all. There was an article in the New York Times (December 23, 2013) – Inequality for Dummies – by regular Op Ed columnist Bill Keller, who clearly thinks he represents the pragmatic, reasonable progressive “centre-left” as distinct from the “left-left” who have their heads in the sand and apparently are content to mouth of slogans to make themselves feel better but which do nothing to address reality or advance the progressive cause. My version of the topic is inverted. I usually think the “centre-left”, which used to be the centre-right or even further out to the right before neo-liberalism shifted the central point sharply so that it made Genghis Khan look downright reasonable, are gutless wonders who pretend to be progressives if it allows them to extra personal rents (rewards) and/or gain position of power in non-conservative political parties. I typically see the “centre-left” as part of the problem not part of the solution. So I read on.