Archive for June 16th, 2011

Marginal Revolution: America’s hottest economist

June 16, 2011

According to Business Week:

Tyler Cowen is  America’s Hottest Economist.

The George Mason University professor has written a bestseller, The Great Stagnation, keeps an influential blog, and reads way too many books. 

Cowen’s first rule of reading: You need not finish.

He takes up books with great hope and no mercy, and when he is done—sometimes after five minutes—he abandons them in public, an act he calls a “liberation.”

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His best seller, The Great Stagnation, runs through three centuries’ worth of what Cowen calls the “low-hanging fruit” of economic growth: free land, technological breakthroughs, and smart kids waiting to be educated. For developed economies.

He argues, none of these remains to be plucked.

Yet America has built political and social institutions on the assumption of endless growth.

Cowen thinks that now that America has used up the frontier, educated all of the farm kids, and built a couple of cars for every family, we might be done growing for awhile.

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Cowen is still best known for his blog: Marginal Revolution.

It’s the second-most popular blog on economics.

Greg Mankiw’s eponymous blog at Harvard just edged it out; both picked up far more votes than Paul Krugman’s New York Times blog Conscience of a Liberal, which ranked third, or Freakonomics, at fifth.

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If you’re a non-white Liberal man who lives on the west coast and didn’t attend college …

June 16, 2011

… you’re more likely than average to have lost your job in the past year.

Last week’s CNN-Opinion Research Poll, asked folks if they lost their job in the past 12 months.

Overall,18% of the sample said they lost their job in the past 12 months.

Some interesting numbers from the ‘internals’:

  • 21% of men lost their jobs, 15% of women
  • 26% of non-whites lost their jobs, 14% of whites
  • 21% who didn’t attend college lost their jobs, 16% who attended college
  • 25% of self-identified Liberals lost their jobs, 17% of Conservatives, 14% of Moderates
  • 25% of folks living in the West lost their jobs, 19% of Southerners, 14% of Northeasters, 11% of Midwesterners

Draw your own conclusions …