June 2012
45 posts
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Leading States in the Fiscal Two-Step
[Note on the cartoon: My technical and blog etiquette expert Diana Kimball tells me it is proper etiquette to acknowledge the origin of photos by linking to the source. I won’t go back and do that on all of my earlier posts, but I wanted to give you the link to this one because I found it early on, and then was frustrated that I couldn’t find it when it came time to post...
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A Proposal for the supplysideliberal Community's...
Although I plan to keep tight editorial—and for the most part, authorial—control over this blog itself, in a broader sense I view supplysideliberal as a collective enterprise. I hope readers of this blog will gel into an online community that goes beyond this blog. This will be a community of thoughtful people who do not all think alike; they need not be “Supply-Side...
supplysideliberal.com Takes on a Math Columnist:...
Mathematics is a crucial tool for economics. In my view, it is good for all economists to try to understand better what is going on in mathematics. So I have decided to host an occasional math column in this blog.
Those of you who have been following this blog closely have seen the very interesting posts based on Gary Cornell’s emails to me. Gary has agreed to be this blog’s math...
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Is Monetary Policy Thinking in Thrall to Wallace...
Economics (or even just the combination of stabilization policy and macro public finance that I laid out as a core focus for this blog in its original Prospectus, “What is a Supply-Side Liberal?”) is too vast for me to have the crystallized intelligence necessary to do this blog with the care it deserves on my own. So I need your help. And I spent some time yesterday working with my...
Comments on supplysideliberal.com
Update, April 21, 2013: I want to encourage more commentary on my blog. I need to approve each comment unless you are whitelisted. But if you send me a tweet to let me know you need a comment approved, I will get to it quicker, and normally approve it and whitelist you. I do try to enforce a certain level of civility and decorum (including a language filter), but on substance, I want a robust...
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Gary Cornell on Intergenerational Mobility
Mathematician Gary Cornell has a theory I like about perceptions of intergenerational mobility in different countries and an empirical question the theory depends on. Please send replies to him at gary@thecornells.com . I will find out from him what answers he got. Here is his email I reprint with his permission with his theory and question:
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Hi Miles, thanks for...
Miles's Curriculum Vitae →
My personal website is a mess. I am having technical problems uploading anything to it. I will work on some basic improvements later on this Summer. In the meantime, I wanted to give you a link to my updated CV.
Gary Cornell on Andrew Wiles
With Gary Cornell’s permission, I reprint here an email he sent me with a correction to the wikipedia quotation in my post “Trillions and Trillions: Getting Used to Balance Sheet Monetary Policy.”
By the way, Gary was alluding to Alan Blinder’s book Hard Heads, Soft Hearts: Tough-Minded Economics for a Just Society, which in fact has been a book that influenced my thinking...
Miles's Tweets →
Among other things, I’ll use twitter to expand on the bio you see on the sidebar.
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"Henry George and the Carbon Tax": A Quick... →
The title is a link to Noah Smith’s post “Carbon Taxes Won’t Work. Here’s What Will.”
I have to be quick because I have proofs to read for my new AER paper with Dan Benjamin, Ori Heffetz and Alex Rees-Jones. One downside of blogging is that your coauthors know what you are doing instead of working on your joint paper with them.
Forgive me, Noah, if I am...
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A Supply-Side Liberal Joins the Pigou Club
I try not to oversimplify in my posts, but I confess to oversimplifying on occasion in the titles of my posts. The number of words it is reasonable to put into a title—and a title’s function of intriguing people enough that they might actually read a post—make me willing to make that compromise.
In the title to my last post “Why Taxes are Bad,” I am referring to...
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Why Taxes are Bad
In “Miles Kimball, the Supply-Side Liberal,” Noah Smith summarizes my post “Can Taxes Raise GDP?” with this passage:
Many people are familiar with the fact that people work about the same amount whether taxes are low (as in the 2000s) or high (as in the 1960s). Miles agrees with this, but points out that high taxes hurt people in a different way, by making them feel so...
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Noah Smith: "Miles Kimball, the Supply-Side... →
Very kind words from Noah, plus an excellent summary of several of my posts.
The existence of this blog is due in part to the encouragement I received from Noah and from my daughter Diana. Thanks to both of them. I learned blogging style from reading Diana’s excellent blog.
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An Early-Bird Tweet from Justin Wolfers →
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Scott Sumner: "'What Should The Fed Do?' Is The... →
Scott Sumner writes:
Several commenters asked me for a critique of Miles Kimball’s new post on monetary policy. I like him a lot, but I’m afraid this post will be mostly negative. Of course that’s not surprising, as Kimball is like 99.99% of other economists; he looks at monetary policy through the wrong end of the telescope.
I will definitely talk about nominal GDP targeting and the other...
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Karl Smith of Forbes: "Miles Kimball on QE" →
Karl Smith writes:
I am happy that Kimball is raising the level of discussion in the blogosphere.
More on the issues he raises later.
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Trillions and Trillions: Getting Used to Balance...
There is something wonderful about having earned one’s first big critic in the blogosphere, so I do want to answer Stephen Williamson’s post “Quantitative Easing, the Conventional View.” But before the end of this post I promise to also make two important points that go beyond this small dustup with Stephen. I will talk about:
the role of economic models in informing...
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Stephen Williamson: "Quantitative Easing: The... →
This is a critical post about my third post “Balance Sheet Monetary Policy: A Primer.” Stephen makes serious points that cannot be answered quickly and will have to be answered in the course of major posts sometime down the line. For now let me just welcome his characterization of my viewpoint as “The Conventional View.” What I said in my post may be...
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National Rainy Day Accounts →
To back up the idea that there may be even better policies than FLOC’s, here is another proposal from my paper “Getting the Biggest Bang for the Buck in Fiscal Policy” in the section: “3. Household Finance Considerations.”
… in principle, national lines of credit in times of low demand could be superseded in the long run (at least in part) by a modest level...
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Reihan Salam: "Miles Kimball on Federal Lines of... →
I want to endorse Reihan Salam’s statement that “FLOCs are best understood as a second-best alternative to counter-cyclical transfers, not as an ideal solution.” There are probably better ways to stimulate the economy, but I think issuing FLOCs at the appropriate time is a feasible policy—well within the range of political possibility—that is much better than many...
