Economics On The Ground in Silicon Valley
The economy appears to be on the minds of magazine editors these days and no wonder. With the stimulus running out the economy appears to be headed south again. This contradicts my experience last week in Silicon Valley where the CEOs I met with said they were, 1) Raising more money, not because they need [...]
Zero Marginal Product Workers
There’s an interesting debate going on over at Tyler Cowan’s Marginal Revolution blog about Zero marginal product workers. Here’s my theory, which I posted in the comments there: Let’s say Jack and John are both employed doing the same work while employment is high (and fear of unemployment is therefore low–if either loses his job [...]
Another Form of Supply Risk — Organized Labor is More Out of Touch Than Ever
A visitor to our office earlier this week brought up his outsider view of Chicago as a city where organized labor was decimating the conference business. $444 per hour union forklift drivers will do that to you, I suppose. His observation was correct, however, given the recent flight of conferences from the city due to [...]
Wealth Gap
My friend Meryl sent me this and asked for comment… rather than send her 40 tweets I thought a blog post was in order. The basic thesis of the Business Insider piece is that the gap between rich and poor has widened. By the way, the world isn’t flat either… Here’s my problem with this [...]
The Stimulus Backlash
It appears that one very significant problem that the Administration and the Federal Reserve created, a frightening spike in unemployment, is the result of a massive miscalculation about how the staggering borrowing by the government would play out.
The Fed endorsed a policy of record borrowing under the theory that we were at risk of a [...]
