One of the big questions this past year is how much the terms of macroeconomic debate have really changed compared with a few years ago. Here's an exhibit for the case that they have changed a lot.
This is a direct rejection of the past 30 years' textbook view of inflation: that it's always a result of excess spending or demand relative to potential output (which is fixed by long-run "structural" factors) and should be left strictly to the central bank to deal with.
More immediately, the Biden team is directly challenging conventional estimates of potential output that assume - implicitly or explicitly - that the US economy was operating at or above capacity before the pandemic.
Seems like the administration shares two key @rooseveltinst views on the economy: That the US suffers from a chronic demand shortfall that conventional measures of potential miss, and that inflation is about specific bottlenecks in production, not economy-wide overheating.
The "reduce demand by making Americans" poorer is a nice demystification of monetary policy, too. Unlike a lot of people with an economics background who talk as if the Fed can reduce inflation by magic, this makes clear that it can only do so by reducing employment and income.
I also can't help pointing out that it's quite similar to language I've used in the past:
A little late, here is the obligatory what-wrote-in-2021 thread. It wasn’t the most productive year for me, but I wrote a number of things I feel good about, including my first-ever bylines in both The New York Times and The Washington Post.
At the start of the year I gave a response to Michael Hudson’s David Gordon lecture on financialization at the (virtual) meetings of the AEA. My part begins at 43:00, but if you’re interested in the topic, you should watch Michael’s preceding talk as well.
Replying to Hudson let me lay out my thoughts on one of the great isms of our times, financialization, and why it’s not helpful to see an opposition of finance vs industrial capital. My comments were published in Review of Radical Political Economics. jwmason.org/wp-content/upl…
I've uploaded a set of teaching notes I use in my Research Methods class, which is basically a class on statistics for policy work. jwmason.org/wp-content/upl…
They're very much a work in progress, but if you teach econometrics or statistics (or are trying to learn them) please take a look - I'd be very interested if you find them helpful.
I'm self consciously trying to follow a somewhat different approach than most econometrics texts, by consistently taking a sample-first rather than a population-first perspective - starting from data as you actually encounter it rather than a hypothetical true distribution.
You often hear that higher inflation is associated with higher real interest rates - that's supposed to be one of its major costs. I don't know where this bit of folk wisdom came from, but the reality is exactly the opposite. Higher inflation almost always means lower real rates.
The US has experience many episodes of inflation (and some of deflation) over the past century, and the early 1980s is the *only* case in which higher inflation has been associated with higher real interest rates.
To the extent that interest rates are linked to inflation, this is entirely mediated by the central bank. Higher inflation may cause the central bank to tighten, and bond yields do (slowly and incompletely) move with the policy rate.
There seem to be a significant number of economists and economics-adjaent people who generally support strong demand and increased public spending, but are deeply worried about inflation. I'm genuinely curious how they'd answer the following questions.
First, do you think that some (not necessarily all) of the slow growth in employment and GDP after the Great Recession compared to before it was due to the ongoing effects of weak demand (hysteresis)?
Second, if weak demand caused a lasting fall in GDP and employment below the earlier trend, could a sustained period of strong demand (with GDP above current estimates of potential) reverse that damage?
Here is one way to think about the inflation we are seeing now. (a thread)
Over much of the past two years, large parts of the economy were unable to operate as normal. Schools and daycares were shut down. Airports were operating at 5 percent capacity. No one was going to the gym or eating in restaurants. You probably remember this! 1/
Though you might have forgotten the scale of it. For example: In March of 2020, fewer than 100,000 people passed through TSA checkpoints each day, compared with 2.5 million a day in 2019. 2/
A funny thing about "labor shortages" is that with the end of pandemic UI we just had a very powerful experiment on the effect of changes in work incentives on employment, and yet no one seems to be drawing any broader lessons from it.
If ending pandemic UI did not raise employment, that is not just a fact about pandemic UI. It is very informative about how important labor supply is to employment in general.
A nice example of the refusal to learn from this is the beltway journalist who admits that non-effect of expiring UI on employment is surprising, but then just goes on with his but-this-one-goes-to-11 insistence that employment problems are all about labor supply, not demand.