Sunday, September 11, 2011

Paul Davidson on Obama’s Stimulus

Paul Davidson is interviewed here on Obama’s stimulus plan. A nice take on Obama from one of America’s leading Post Keynesians.

Analysis of President Obama's Jobs Speech | Chicago Tonight | WTTW

On a lighter note, here is Warren Mosler, the high-profile supporter of MMT, introducing Paul Davidson (perhaps at a conference?):



I cannot find any further video of the actual talk, however. A pity!

4 comments:

  1. Oh, about stimulus...
    http://mercatus.org/sites/default/files/publication/Did_Stimulus_Dollars_Hire_The_Unemployed_Jones_Rothschild_WP34.pdf

    "A natural question is whether organizations that found it easier to hire good workers received a disproportionate share of the stimulus. We found little evidence that this was the case. Multiple statistical specifications, including the ones presented in Tables 3 and 4, failed to find a significant relationship (at a 95-percent confidence interval) between the percentage of an organization’s annual revenue coming from ARRA and whether that organization found it easier to hire. Similarly, we find no evidence that organizations that received more total stimulus dollars (as measured by an organization’s tier) found it easier to find good workers."

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  2. So Meng, the findings of the Mercatus Centre were entirely in line with the interests and ideology of their billionaire sponsors? Surprising.

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  3. Thanks for the link, I enjoyed it. Although I don't know that Davidson's belief that Obama saying he will raise taxes on the wealthy is going to play poorly politically because all Americans think they may be rich someday. I think that's a very minority opinion nowadays, where many working Americans feel that the game is rigged against them and they feel the lack of social mobility. When one works 60-80 hours a week just to get by and doesn't have any money left over to save, it's hard to project oneself becoming wealthy.

    Completely unrelated, my brother-in-law (an Austrian) has been asking me to read Human Action by Mises. Now I'm not a big believer in unregulated free markets, so I don't imagine I'll get much from that, but I'm curious if you've read this book Lord Keynes and you think there is much worth in spending the time to read the 1000+ pages. I would mostly read it for the fun of a later debate, but I don't know if reading all of it would be unbearable.

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  4. Brad,

    I've read virtually all of Human Action.
    It's a long, tedious book, in many ways, though the scholar's edition has a useful introduction that is worth reading:

    http://books.google.com.au/books?id=bqhZRn5zWA4C&printsec=frontcover&dq=human+action+scholar%27s+edition&hl=en&ei=2vBsToqZH4yViAefh8zgBA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CCsQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false

    If you can't stand the whole 1000 pages, I'd advise you to just read the sections that have topics interest you most, by looking at the contents page.

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