Plain Sense Economics

Our Principles of Macroeconomic classes have been learning more about GDP – how it is measured, and what levels of GDP growth are sustainable. The New York Times reported significant growth in GDP for China for the 4th quarter and all of 2010…
China’s economy grew at a higher-than-expected rate of 9.8 percent in the [...]

James Surowiecki writes in The New Yorker that a combination of thoughtful, but less visible stimulus decisions and some less effective decisions made it hard for the American people to believe the 2009 fiscal stimulus worked.
[The] Washington stimulus has become the policy that dare not speak its name. This wouldn’t be surprising if we [...]

Catharine Rampell in The New York Times Economix blog wonders if the most recent recession has earned the title, The Great Recession. She is leaning towards, “yes”.
Here is one graph that illustrates the impact on economic output from 10 post World War II recessions. No contest.

This may cause us to scratch our heads about the presence of a recession, but Casey Mulligan’s post in the New York Times Economix has some interesting points about gross domestic product. It is simple enough to be worth reading by principles of economics students.
The opening paragraph:
When measured in terms of financial gyrations and national [...]

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 [...]