Moving the Economy Forward

Posted on 25 July 2011 by Erik Hare | 29 Comments

When the economy isn’t showing any signs of movement, you might think that economists don’t have a lot to talk about. However, that point of view neglects one very important part of the ol’ dismal science –economists always have to make work for themselves in order to remain employed. That gets us to some arcane debates over things most people I know think are pretty obvious.

Paul Krugman often gives us a good popular entry point into these debates, and his last column is no different. Longtime readers will note that I have never been a fan of Krugman (putting it kindly), but I want to note that in this article he is actively promoting the handle “Depression” for our economic state. But I want to take issue with him over three main topics: The length of this Depression, the nature of Keynsianism, and the simple fact that my term “Managed Depression” is way cooler than his “Lesser Depression”.

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Risky Business

Posted on 27 June 2011 by Erik Hare | 22 Comments

The headlines have been screaming it for a week – “Markets soft due to ongoing Greek Crisis,” or something similar. But like The Onion, these headlines often have all the punchline in them and the article doesn’t give much more. Why is the Greek crisis important for US stocks and our economy? Why should we care?

The answer is complicated and hard to explain in an article of less than a few thousand words. The short version of it is very scary – because a Greek default could bring down many financial institutions across the developed world. News outlets have been shying away from this and done, on balance, a lousy job portraying the real problem with Greece.

Not that something awful is about to happen – but the odds of cataclysm are high enough that they have become scary. That means we have to understand that worst case scenario to understand why even a small threat of it multiplies out to a huge risk.

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Restructuring Our Economy – a Plan

Posted on 22 June 2011 by Erik Hare | 43 Comments

It’s one thing to complain about the economy – anyone can do that. But what should be done to fix it? Longtime readers know that I believe that our economic situation is a Managed Depression and that only a fundamental restructuring will end it. This is my Six Point Plan to do exactly that. It describes action by the Federal Government, which is to say that it is a political platform – meaning it is incomplete and taken from a certain perspective. If you have questions, please follow the links.

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Challenge

Posted on 20 June 2011 by Erik Hare | 19 Comments

At the end of a fun summer Saturday, just before Father’s Day, my son and I sat ourselves down and decided to see what was on teevee. There, on the Science Channel, was just what we were hoping for – the RoboGames with Grant Imahara of Mythbusters fame. It’s a competition of remote controlled devices that thrash, rip, and sometimes shoot fire at each other in a metal wrestling match running amok. It’s great stuff. There’s spectacle, destruction and competition – the battle to prove you are the best.

It’s enough to make my son get out his drawing notebook and talk about a father son trip to the Ax Man surplus store, too.

This may seem like a simple father-son moment of geekdom, but it’s much more than that. Competition is the best way to fire the imagination, engaging heart and arm and brain. It could even be an important tool of public policy.

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Waiting for the “Go”

Posted on 13 June 2011 by Erik Hare | 39 Comments

“We wait. We are bored. (He throws up his hand.) No, don’t protest, we are bored to death, there’s no denying it. Good. A diversion comes along and what do we do? We let it go to waste… In an instant all will vanish and we’ll be alone once more, in the midst of nothingness!”
– Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot

The economy was, once again, a big story last week as the reality of a weak job market and potential defaults in Europe swept over stocks. It was time to pay attention to things for a while before we move on and crank it up again as if nothing happened. It’s a pattern that has repeated once a quarter since the meltdown of 2008. But why are things stuck – and why does the financial world only seem to care in spurts? The answers are complex, but it seems that one world seems to have everything it needs except for a solid connection to reality. They only have to pay attention to it every once in a while, or so they think.

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