If you think corporate greed is playing a major role in the current inflation then you need to rethink a lot of your views.
1. FISCAL MULTIPLIERS. Fiscal stimulus is less effective than you thought because it will go more into prices/profits than quantities.
2. INCIDENCE ANALYSIS OF FISCAL TRANSFERS. Distributional tables that show the stimulus checks going to households, for example, not correctly reflect that much of the benefit of the stimulus checks was captured by higher prices instead of higher purchasing power.
3. WORKER POWER AND REAL WAGES. If stronger demand raised the ability of corporations to do unfair or unjustified price increases over and above their costs then the flip side is you are saying that heating the economy lowers real wages.
(All of the above assumed that corporate greed was increased by high demand relative to supply, if it was just an exogenous increase in corporate greed—companies that could have done this in 2019 but mistakenly didn’t—the points would be slightly different.)
Oh, and I’m not updating my views on these topics because I think inflation is the result of demand and supply imbalances not changes in corporate greed.
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I will be enthusiastically supporting faculty legislation to cap the number of A's at Harvard at 20% (plus a bit). The collective action problem that has driven grades higher & higher over time is increasingly problematic. I hope other institutions consider similar steps.
I've talked to numerous colleagues & students about grade inflation. Almost all of them see it as a a problem. I've also heard about as many different ideas for solutions as I've had conversations. I would tweak this proposal in various ways. But would support it over nothing.
One place the current system fails--and it's not the only place--is honors. I'm on the Committee to recommend honors in the economics department. It's increasingly hard to distinguish excellence with so many A's. I believe that now even two A-'s makes you ineligible for Summa.
Depending on how you look at it growth in Q3 was very very strong or very strong or just possibly merely strong. Annual rates:
GDP: 4.3%
Real final sales to domestic purchasers: 2.9%
Average of GDP & GDI: 3.4%
GDI: 2.4%
A big part of the story was consumer spending up at a 3.5% annual rate. Started the year looking weak but new data and revisions have made consumers very strong.
Business fixed investment a bit weaker but also very heterogenous. Equipment investment and IPP up but non-residential structures down for the seventh straight quarter.
Several thoughts on that piece by @nealemahoney & @BharatRamamurti in @nytopinion.
1. They claim price controls are good politically. I'm very open to this being true, I'm under no illusion that what I think is good policy is particularly well correlated with good politics. But I am genuinely interested in more evidence beyond the brief observations they make.
2. They claim that even if you think price controls are a bad idea they can help you pass supply-increasing legislation that is on balance good. Once again, I'm open to this. And in government I've often done 3rd, 7th or 12th best policies because of constraints.