The juxtaposition of this past week’s news headlines, “Greece will not pay IMF loan due on Tuesday” and “Puerto Rico governor says island can’t pay” brought a much ignored truth home. Just as Greece’s economy is an unsustainable element within…
Author: Ed Lotterman
As a group, raisin growers will pay the price
In an 8-1 decision, the Supreme Court ruled last week that the 1940s-era “Federal Marketing Order” for California raisins as currently implemented violates the Fifth Amendment of the U.S. constitution. This is good news for raisin consumers, and I myself…
Of agents, principals and their principles
When we read “The Courtship of Miles Standish” in grade school, I had not yet studied economics, so I didn’t understand the theory underlying John Alden’s quandary or that Priscilla Mullins’ famous suggestion to “speak for yourself, John” constituted “collusion”…
Rising egg prices provide lesson in markets’ elasticity
Every cloud has a silver lining and while the avian flu epidemic hurts virtually all consumers and many producers, it has teachers of introductory economics positively chortling in delight. Examples of real-world resource allocation decisions in response to changing incentives…
‘Social capital’ confounds economists
I am trying to coordinate getting five people together to tear carpet and tile out of an education room at my church. Meanwhile, a Catholic Charities facility a half-mile from my house feeds and houses 60 nonrecovering alcoholics every day.…
Weighing a key ‘public good’
In evaluating many fiscal policy issues, it is important to understand that there often is a difference between the cost to individuals, be they taxpayers or citizens, to government and to society as a whole. Sometimes, “savings” to government are…
Trade agreements are rarely about actual trade
It would be wrong to say the acronym of the much-disputed TPP (or TPTP) signifies something about tempests and teapots rather than trade and the Pacific. The underlying economic and political issues behind the Trans-Pacific Partnership are legitimate. But rhetoric…
Public sector accounting offers little insight
Government accounting is less complete than in the private sector. That hurts the level of information in public discourse on important issues and the legislative process at both state and federal levels. That is not a new insight, but it…
No, 93M people are not unemployed
There are many unemployed people in our country, but not 93 million. Having worked as an economist for 35 years, I am pretty used to hearing well-intentioned but preposterous statements about the economy. So my jaw should have not dropped…
Many read too much into GDP numbers
One swallow proverbially does not make a summer, and one quarter’s economic growth data, good or bad, do not make a trend. Keep that in mind when reading this past week’s news. The U.S. Commerce Department’s Bureau of Economic Analysis…