The Grumpy Economist

    Source  Stephan Schubert Source: Chad Jones "straight out of the Penn World Tables, and I first learned about it from Lee Ohanian a...

Here are two unsettling slides I made for a talk. Here is GDP per capita in US, UK, France and Italy and China (2020 dollars, source world b...

With the current focus on "equity" and "disadvantage," even in the midst of a pandemic, one might yearn for the simplici...

r<g is an essay on the question whether r<g means the government can borrow and not worry about repaying debts. No.  Abstract: A si...

The Fiscal Theory of the Price Level  is a book I'm writing on that topic. It now has a full draft, here .  Comments, typos, suggestions...

About a month ago, Russ Roberts and I had a great conversation about virus, vaccine, and tests for the Econ Talk podcast, and the free marke...

Why are people gloating over Rush Limbaugh’s death?  Charles Lipson writes   The gloating over Rush Limbaugh’s death ought to shock the cons...

Arnold Kling has an intriguing series of blog posts  on the nature of universities and other institutions that are, as he says, cancel-bait....

I'm reading up on the $1.9 trillion "stimulus." This caught me eye :  Biden's plan would set out $160 billion for a nation...

Wouldn't it be nice if there were a $5 test that works in minutes, and can find asymptomatic people who might transmit covid? Imagine ho...

  Discussing stimulus, a colleague passed along a factoid -- wages and salaries, he said,  are running $20 billion a month or $240 billion a...

  In analyzing whether inflation is coming, Mickey Levy at Berenberg Capital passes along the above graph. These are price indices, so the ...

A mid-20s child of a good friend just got the vaccine. Why? He runs a micro-brewery, which his state deemed "essential," because i...

David Battan writing in the WSJ brings come clarity to Robin Hood's trading stop.  It raises some questions for me, however. Much of th...

The long and short of bubbles. A conversation with Owen Lamont on Gamestop and other matters. See my   last post for background and great p...

In case you haven't noticed, Gamestop and a few similar stocks are in a classic bubble. At least it was at 8 AM pacific when I read the ...

Podcast: Link in case the above embeds don't work.  Stanford Doctor and Professor  Jay Bhattacharya joins the GoodFellows for an en...

Open smart, I and other economists argued back in March. Don't just shut lock down the whole economy willy-nilly. An auto-body paint sho...

 " Libertarians in a pandemic " is a good essay by Jacob Grier expanding on many themes I've written about here, whether marke...

The Grumpy Economist podcast is back, and we're going to aim for a once per two week schedule. This week we talk about vaccines, tests, ...