Gregory Clark

Brad Delong has been an enthusiastic supporter of the Obama stimulus package. Michele Boldrin was a signer of the Cato Institute sponsored NYT advert denouncing the stimulus. A couple of weeks ago I wrote a piece about the stimulus, to which both of them responded. And on March 4 at the University of California-Davis they debated the benefits of the stimulus in the "Stimulus Smackdown." Video of the entire debate is available here. More »

US residents owe $35,000 each for the Federal debt. The Government has also created huge unfunded Social Security and Medicare entitlements: so the total obligation per person, which will eventually become further debt, is $168,000 (pdf), 3.8 times national income. President Obama is holding a "fiscal responsibility summit" today to call a halt to the madness. But evidence from the thousand-year history of public debt in England suggests one thing -- the madness… More »

Brad DeLong asks that I not just bemoan the exquisite irrelevance of most academic economists that the current crisis has revealed. Instead he asks that I take sides in the debate between Keynesians like him and Krugman and neoclassicals like Eugene Fama and John Cochrane on the efficacy of fiscal policy.I am no macroeconomist. And I am reluctant to get trampled in a clash of macroeconomic titans. But I find Brad's various arguments, particularly his reductio ad… More »

With the chattering classes consumed by concern for the devastated value of their 401K funds, and their suddenly precarious lifestyles, there has been much anger and scorn directed at those former masters of the universe, financiers.But the shock to the world of finance has been echoed by a shock to the world of academic economics that is just as profound. More »