Plain Sense Economics

Two blog posts, one by Justin Wolfers, writing in the Freakonomics blog, and another by David Leonhardt in the New York Times, report on Stevenson and Wolfers’ research on the relationship between income and happiness. This is a great example of a complaint non-economists have about economists, where the latter keep finding situations which [...]

Harvard University’s Martin Feldstein wrote in the Wall Street Journal today (April 15, 2008 – see article) that the Federal Reserve should stop lowering interest rates. He argues that lower interest rates have a special impact on commodity (i.e. food, oil) prices.
But high unemployment and low capacity utilization would not prevent lower interest rates from [...]

April 3 congressional testimony – as presented by the Wall Street Journal. As my students agreed, he won’t win American Idol, but if you listen closely you’ll hear all the various, important pieces of the current economic situation.
Click to see 3′30″ video clip