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teaching Economics Advanced Placement online education

VIDEO: JOSEPH STIGLITZ

James Surowiecki spoke with Professor Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel Prize-winning economist, about the mishandling of the financial crisis, the relationship between government and markets, and the future of capitalism around the world. They met last month at Stiglitz’s office at Columbia University.

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economics

Employment levels in China began to recover over the past three months in the latest evidence of the rapid rebound in the economy from the international financial crisis as a result of heavy public investment.

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economics

Despite an emerging economic expansion, businesses were sufficiently skittish about the future that the job market continued its long, steep decline in August, according to a new government report Friday. The unemployment rate rose to 9.7 percent, from 9.4 percent, as employers shed jobs for the 20th straight month, the Labor Department said.

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economics

Should we worry more about unemployment or inflation?

Is the massive spending of taxpayers' money by governments, to make good the current aversion to spending by everybody else, storing up inflation or not?

The fear in some quarters, is that governments will eventually print money to finance today's spending.
Policy priorities

In a way, it is a re-run of the debate that has rumbled on since the 1930s between Keynesians on one side - and neo-classical economists and monetarists on the other.

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economics

One response to the current crisis has been a rise in the popularity of behavioural economics, which examines the psychological and emotional factors behind transactions. These models drop the assumption of the rational actor yet implicitly keep the same model of economic rationality at their heart. We may diverge from the path of rationality for all sorts of psychological reasons but only because emotion, Keynes’s famous “animal spirits”, clouds our judgment.

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economics rational behavior markets

Investor’s Business Daily would like you to believe that Obamacare would turn America into Britain — or, rather, a dystopian fantasy version of Britain. The screamers on talk radio and Fox News would have you believe that the plan is to turn America into the Soviet Union. But the truth is that the plans on the table would, roughly speaking, turn America into Switzerland — which may be occupied by lederhosen-wearing holey-cheese eaters, but wasn’t a socialist hellhole the last time I looked.

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economics

Two Japanese were detained by Italian financial police last week after trying to enter Switzerland with $134 billion worth of undeclared U.S. bonds, mostly Treasury bonds, an Italian newspaper reported Wednesday.

The Japanese Consulate General in Milan acknowledged that two people had been detained, but it was still trying to confirm with Italian authorities their identities and whether they are Japanese nationals.

According to the report in il Giornale, two unidentified Japanese in their 50s concealed the bonds, including 249 U.S. Treasury bonds worth $500 million each, in a suitcase with a false bottom. The bonds were found June 3 during a search by Italian authorities in Chiasso, on the border with Switzerland about 50 km north of Milan.

The newspaper did not say on what grounds the two were detained, but they may have been held on suspicion of attempting to take a large amount of securities out of Italy without declaring them.

It said the Italian authorities were investigating whether the securities are genuine, given their huge value.

If the bonds are genuine, the two could be fined around 40 percent of their total value, it said.

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economics

So what kind of teachers could a school get if it paid them $125,000 a year?

An accomplished violist who infuses her music lessons with the neuroscience of why one needs to practice, and creatively worded instructions like, “Pass the melody gently, as if it were a bowl of Jell-O!”

A self-described “explorer” from Arizona who spent three decades honing her craft at public, private, urban and rural schools.

Two with Ivy League degrees. And Joe Carbone, a phys ed teacher, who has the most unusual résumé of the bunch, having worked as Kobe Bryant’s personal trainer.

“Developed Kobe from 185 lbs. to 225 lbs. of pure muscle over eight years,” it reads.

They are members of an eight-teacher dream team, lured to an innovative charter school that will open in Washington Heights in September with salaries that would make most teachers drop their chalk and swoon; $125,000 is nearly twice as much as the average New York City public school teacher earns, and about two and a half times as much as the national average for teacher salaries. They also will be eligible for bonuses, based on schoolwide performance, of up to $25,000 in the second year.

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economics education teacher pay incentives wages

MY day job is teaching introductory economics to about 700 Harvard undergraduates a year. Lately, when people hear that, they often ask how the economic crisis is changing what’s offered in a freshman course.

They’re usually disappointed with my first answer: not as much as you might think. Events have been changing so quickly that we teachers are having trouble keeping up. Syllabuses are often planned months in advance, and textbooks are revised only every few years.

But there is another, more fundamental reason: Despite the enormity of recent events, the principles of economics are largely unchanged. Students still need to learn about the gains from trade, supply and demand, the efficiency properties of market outcomes, and so on. These topics will remain the bread-and-butter of introductory courses.

Nonetheless, the teaching of basic economics will need to change in some subtle ways in response to recent events. Here are four:

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economics

The nation needs to begin planning now to eventually bring taxes and spending in line, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke said yesterday, arguing that large budget deficits, if sustained, could deepen the financial crisis and choke off the economy.
Bernanke's testimony to Congress reflected growing concern among economists and investors that the nation's long-term fiscal imbalances could stand in the way of economic recovery by driving up the interest rates that the government, businesses and consumers pay to borrow money. The rate the government pays has already risen in recent weeks.

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economics balanced budget crowding out

On Wednesday last week, yields on 10-year US Treasuries – generally seen as the benchmark for long-term interest rates – rose above 3.73 per cent. Once upon a time that would have been considered rather low. But the financial crisis has changed all that: at the end of last year, the yield on the 10-year fell to 2.06 per cent. In other words, long-term rates have risen by 167 basis points in the space of five months. In relative terms, that represents an 81 per cent jump.

Most commentators were unnerved by this development, coinciding as it did with warnings about the fiscal health of the US. For me, however, it was good news. For it settled a rather public argument between me and the Princeton economist Paul Krugman.

It is a brave or foolhardy man who picks a fight with Mr Krugman, the most recent recipient of the Nobel Prize for Economics. Yet a cat may look at a king, and sometimes a historian can challenge an economist.

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economics

Is the US (and a number of other high-income countries) on the road to fiscal Armageddon? Are recent jumps in government bond rates proof that investors are worried about fiscal prospects? My answers to these questions are: No and No. This does not mean there is no reason for worry. It is rather that there are powerful arguments against fiscal retrenchment right now and strong reasons for welcoming recent moves in the bond markets.

Last week, the Financial Times carried two columns arguing that the US fiscal path was unsustainable, one by Stanford University’s John Taylor and the other by the Harvard historian Niall Ferguson. The latter, in turn, was a comment on a debate with, among others, the New York Times columnist and Nobel laureate Paul Krugman at the end of April.

On one point all serious analysts agree: public debt cannot rise, relative to gross domestic product, without limit. To embark on fiscal stimulus in the short run, one must be credible in the long run.

So what is the disagreement? Prof Ferguson made three propositions: first, the recent rise in US government bond rates shows that the bond market is “quailing” before the government’s huge issuance; second, huge fiscal deficits are both unnecessary and counterproductive; and, finally, there is reason to fear an inflationary outcome. These are widely held views. Are they right?

The first point is, on the evidence, wrong.

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economics

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economics

Biggest Holders of US Gov't Debt

As the US government spends an unprecedented amount of money to fix the nation's economy, there is an equally great need to raise the cash to pay for it. This is accomplished through borrowing, whereby Uncle Sam sells Treasury securities of varying maturity.

For investors, the government bills, notes and bonds are considered a safe financial product because they have a guaranteed rate of return, based on faith in future US tax revenues. The government has been partially funding operations via Treasury securities for decades. This borrowing adds to the national debt, which is now above $11 trillion and is rising every day. Much of that debt is held by private sector, but about 40 percent is held by public entities, including parts of the government. Here's who owns the most.

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economics

Making the world's knowledge computable

Today's Wolfram|Alpha is the first step in an ambitious, long-term project to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable by anyone. You enter your question or calculation, and Wolfram|Alpha uses its built-in algorithms and growing collection of data to compute the answer. Based on a new kind of knowledge-based computing... more »

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economics

A great article outlining the likelihood of "real" versus "financial" crowding-out that may result from the US fiscal stimulus
...the key question is whether government spending that comes into action during recession is likely to crowd out new private spending, dollar for dollar. The answer depends on the extent to which real and financial resources are currently under-utilised.

“Real” crowding out occurs when labour and capital are already fully employed so that further spending exceeds capacity and leads to inflation. The logic of the harm done by inflation is well understood. But the logic of “financial” crowding out is less intuitive and more complex.

Simply put, financial crowding out results from rising interest rates when government deficits put pressure on bond markets. This kind of crowding out is most plausible in the US, which began the recession with the biggest deficit in world history. However, relative to national income, it is not nearly as large as that which Britain ran after the Napoleonic wars. And currently, the biggest as a percentage of national income is Japan’s: almost 200 per cent of its gross domestic product. It doesn’t seem to be crowding out private spending as the Japanese long-term interest rate is still only 1.5 per cent.

Nevertheless, skeptics argue that dramatic doubling of US deficits this year and beyond could leave little room for private sector borrowing. If the US deficit stifles rather than stimulates recovery of its private sector, prolonged worldwide recession is inevitable.

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economics crowding-out

All should read this, it is a powerful exposition of the competing ideologies about the solutions to our global recession:

Following are excerpts from a symposium on the economic crisis presented by The New York Review of Books and PEN World Voices at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on April 30. The participants were former senator Bill Bradley, Niall Ferguson, Paul Krugman, Nouriel Roubini, George Soros, and Robin Wells, with Jeff Madrick as moderator.

—The Editors

Jeff Madrick: It was six months ago now that the Lehman debacle occurred, that AIG was rescued, that Bank of America bought Merrill Lynch; it was about six months ago that the TARP funds started being distributed. The economy was doing fairly poorly in much of 2008, and then fell off a cliff in the last quarter of 2008 and into 2009, shrinking at a 6 percent annual rate—an extraordinary drop in our national income. It is now by some very important measures the worst economic recession in the post–World War II era. Employment has dropped faster than ever before in this space of time.

We have a three-front problem: a housing market that went crazy as the housing bubble burst; a credit crisis, the most severe we've known since the early 1930s; and now a sharp drop in demand for goods and services and capital investment, leading to a severe recession. What gives us the jitters is that all of these are related. We have seen some deceleration in the rate of economic decline, and many people are saying that "green shoots" are showing. What is the actual state of the economy, and do we need a serious mid-course correction on the part of the Obama administration?

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economics

IT MAY be surprising, but the objective of economists is not to maximise income. We aim to maximise welfare. Welfare can mean different things to different people, and is often correlated with income, but they are not the same. Economists usually focus on consumption as being an indicator of well-being, but that leaves out leisure and intangibles such as family and friendships.

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economics

This is a good article about the Keynesian/Classical debate in macroeconomics:

The Obama administration and Congress justify the vast new government borrowing and spending by asserting that it constitutes “fiscal stimulus.” Not only would each dollar the government borrowed and spent produce a dollar of GDP that would never have been created had the dollar been left in private hands (a fiscal “multiplier” of 1.0), but it would stimulate a wave of new private sector spending, investment and employment that would generate 30, 40, 50 cents or more of additional new wealth per dollar (a multiplier above 1.0)...

...there are two brands of remedy. The first are government measures intended to eliminate obstacles to the adaptation of supply to changing demand. This is the now much-maligned classical brand of remedy. The second are fiscal and other government measures designed to force demand to adapt to supply. This is the Keynesian brand of remedy, now beloved in Washington, based on the belief that under-employment is a congenital defect of the economic system.

Each huge dose of this second remedy serves to further obliterate the functioning of the price mechanism, thus necessitating another huge dose of it. In the long run, this almost certainly means crippling debt, inflation or both. But Keynes, of course, advised against thinking too much about the long run.

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economics