All Posts Tagged With: "GDP"
Naive Keynesianism: A Failure of Imagination
Each of us has a set of peeves—things that disproportionately irritate us. By their nature, most peeves are small. For example, I bristle at the failure to use hyphens correctly. As my late, great teacher Fritz Machlup pointed out, a foreign exchange student is typically not a foreign-exchange student. The first is a student studying [...]
21Apr2011 | Donald J. Boudreaux | 8 comments | ContinuedWar Would End the Recession?
In his September 28 New York Times blog post, Paul Krugman announced that “economics is not a morality play.” That turn of phrase is his way of defending the idea that in unusual times, such as the sort of deep recession we are in, we can get strange relationships between economic cause and effect. The result [...]
22Dec2010 | Steven Horwitz | 41 comments | ContinuedDoes Saving Reduce GDP?
Warren C. Gibson’s article, “GDP: Who Needs It?” in the May 2010 edition of the Freeman, asserts an inconsistency. He correctly denigrates the Keynesian notion of promoting consumption spending as a means of promoting GDP growth: “The predominance of consumption seems to have spawned the bizarre notion that if we can only get consumer spending [...]
24Nov2010 | and James C. W. Ahiakpor | 2 comments | ContinuedConsumer Spending Drives the Economy?
Consumer spending makes up more than 70 percent of the economy, and it usually drives growth during economic recoveries.” —“Consumers Give Boost to Economy,” New York Times, May 1 Every quarter, when the government releases its latest GDP figures, we hear the familiar refrain: “What the consumer does is vital for economic growth.” “If the [...]
22Sep2010 | Mark Skousen | 26 comments | ContinuedConsumer Spending Doesn’t Drive the Economy
The truth is that consumer spending does not account for 70 percent of economic activity and is not the mainstay of the
U. S. economy.
GDP: Who Needs It?
“For so it is, oh my Lord God, I measure it, but what it is that I measure I do not know.” –St. Augustine Gross Domestic Product (GDP) gets a lot of attention these days. It’s fair game for bloggers, talking heads, perhaps your local barber. While most agree that higher GDP is better than [...]
20Apr2010 | Warren C. Gibson | 14 comments | ContinuedThe Balance-of-Payments Deficit: Not to Worry
Quick. What’s the trade deficit between California and the rest of the world? Don’t try Googling it because you won’t find an answer. No government agency—or private entity—computes the dollar value of goods that people in the rest of the world sell to or buy from Californians. Why not? Because it doesn’t matter. Yet governments [...]
5Jan2010 | David R. Henderson | 7 comments | ContinuedHealth Care and Medical Care
In the current Atlantic Megan McArdle discusses the flaws in using gross domestic product as a measurement of a country’s well-being and notes that a search is underway for alternative measures. (Actually Mark Skousen proposed one in The Freeman some years ago.) Her column contains this interesting paragraph: One possible approach is to focus on [...]
5Nov2009 | Sheldon Richman | 0 comments | ContinuedDistress Index Updated
FEE updated the Distress Index this morning to reflect the reported increase in GDP during 2009 Q3. As you might imagine the estimated increase of 3.5% in the GDP does not dramatically change our economic situation. GDP is still down -2.3% from a year and many of the gains were driven by unsustainable government stimulus. [...]
29Oct2009 | Mike Van Winkle | 1 comment | ContinuedWorld War II Ended the Great Depression?
In his 2008 book, The Return of Depression Economics and the Crisis of 2008, Paul Krugman writes: “The Great Depression in the United States was brought to an end by a massive deficit-financed public works program, known as World War II.” He has since repeated this bon mot in a number of columns and television [...]
23Oct2009 | Richard W. Fulmer | 29 comments | ContinuedThe Great Depression and World War II
What about World War II? Did it end the Great Depression? More generally, is war good for the economy? I answer both in the negative and borrow here from Ludwig von Mises: “War prosperity is like the prosperity that an earthquake or a plague brings.” As Higgs points out, because of the array of interventions in the wartime economy, war materiel was valued incorrectly and therefore the GDP data overstate economic conditions. Moreover, conscription and arms production gave a misleading employment picture
21May2009 | Art Carden | 8 comments | ContinuedRemembering Julian Simon
Paul A. Cleveland is a professor of economics at Birmingham-Southern College in Alabama. Erin Hagert is studying economics at The King’s College in New York. The late Julian Simon was not a household name, but he left an indelible mark nonetheless by demanding that environmentalists produce evidence for their doomsday predictions. Meanwhile, he produced his [...]
1Jan2007 | and Paul A. Cleveland | 1 comment | ContinuedHow’s the Third World Doing?
The Third World is in trouble. Standards of living are plummeting, while the West is getting richer. Nearly everyone seems to believe it. The left wants to believe it as a justification for global socialism. Racists want to believe it because it “proves” the superiority of the white race. The media think it’s a good [...]
1Sep2002 | James Peron | 0 comments | ContinuedBeyond GDP: A Breakthrough in National Income Accounting
“It is apparent that a large part of a country’s total production serves for the production of capital goods and not for the production of consumer goods, and that the production of capital goods must itself become a specialized branch of manufacturing.” —Wilhelm Röpke1 Good news! The U.S. Department of Commerce, which compiles Gross Domestic [...]
1Apr2001 | Mark Skousen | 3 comments | ContinuedDevelopment as Freedom
Amartya Sen, the winner of the 1998 Nobel Prize for Economics, has been called a “student of the world’s miserable.” Sen’s research has concentrated on the economic problems that affect the world’s poorest citizens: chronic hunger, famine, illiteracy, infant mortality, and disease. For the past 35 years, he has devoted his considerable scholarly talent to [...]
1May2000 | Victor A. Matheson | 2 comments | ContinuedBurn Your House, Boost the Economy
Lawrence Parks is executive director of the Foundation for the Advancement of Monetary Education. Adapted from The Money Review, November 1997. An earlier version of this article appeared in The Free Market. As recently as 50 years ago, classical economists regarded the vitality of the economy as its ability to produce things that people wanted [...]
1Mar1998 | Lawrence M. Parks | 0 comments | Continued-
The Latest
Contraception: Insuring the Uninsurable
Update below. Controversy rages over the Obama administration’s mandate that all employers – including... Read More
The Snow Plowers’ Petition
The following might have happened in a small college town in upstate New York… In a cold and snowy... Read More
Super Bowl versus Education?
In the spirit of Super Bowl weekend I’d like to deconstruct a Facebook status update that a friend... Read More
Capitalism, Corporatism, and the Freed Market
When a front-running presidential contender tells the country that thanks to Barack Obama, “[w]e are... Read More
Creating Jobs versus Creating Value
Picking on New York Times columnist Paul Krugman is one of the largest participation sports on the Internet.... Read More
