Congratulations!

Congratulations to the recent Nobel Prize winners in Economics! I know, it's not called that, but you know what I mean. There's a plethora of sources you can read to learn more about the winners.

Also, how about some other interesting articles? Monetary views, shale, the Great Depression, currency wars, and China/India/Brazilian growth. I don't really agree with that last one at all, but it's an interesting topic.

Enjoy!

Oil, government, manufacturing, and low wage workers.

BP found a lot of oil in the Gulf of Mexico. Good news for Houston, and anyone who pays for gas. Though, keep in mind, that this is just a drop in the bucket for worldwide supply, and the oil is harder to get than ever.

The Wall Street Journal actually has an article about government helping the economy.

Growth in manufacturing too? Interesting. Cash for Clunkers may have helped that, but I don't know if it'll hold in the long term.

Low wage workers reportedly are often cheated, as a result getting paid less than the minimum wage. This is widespread, not just affecting undocumented workers.

Oil and gas prices, health care, university productivity, and Houston power rates

James Hamilton takes a look at oil and natural gas prices. Something has got to give.

PBS has a Frontline report comparing the health programs in five capitalist democracies around the world. Paul Krugman explains why health care can't be solved by the free market. Seems to me that health insurance suffers the tragedy of the commons.

Catherine Rampell at Economix reports on a measure of productivity of universities.

Houstonians: TXU is lowering their rates. They may still not be the lowest for you, but keep an eye out! How's that for price fluctuation?

Trains, raising taxes, popping bubbles, and oil

Ed Glaeser doesn't like the high-speed train idea. We should focus on high-density areas, he says. What about focusing on major airline routes? Houston may not be particulary dense (though, we're getting our own rail system, eventually) but having a train option to get to Chicago or Boston relatively quickly would be a boon. Ryan Avent has more criticisms of Glaeser.

David Leonhardt talks about Club Wagner--to recognize that we need to raise taxes in a wealthy society.

Kevin Drum agrees with NY Fed Chairman William Dudley when he says that the Fed should take a more active role in recognizing and popping bubbles.

I always find it interesting when people try to make predictions about the future price of oil. One analysts thinks it'll go down to $55 soon, and hover there as a summertime low.

Hurricane claims, grocery stores, inventive cities, recession news, and Venezuela

2008 hurricane claims put Texas home insurance companies in the red. Ouch. Hurricanes continue to affect us. I guess whoever designed the hurricane insurance plans didn't know how much risk was actually involved, or those insurance companies didn't properly prepare themselves for such a situation.

Grocery stores are doing well during the recession.

Houston is one of the world's most inventive cities. We're pretty creative people! I don't think a lot of people believe this, though.

Productivity and labor costs are up. You might expect this from a recession, as companies try to focus on efficiency to weather the rough times.

Venezuela is seizing the assets of more oil service companies. I would have ended my operations there some time ago.

History, open data, auto industry, financial planning, bachelor's degrees, and gas prices

A new blog on economic history.

Hey, world bankers like open data too! Those are great guys.

Speaking of which, Hal Varian used Google Trends to make better forecasts.

James Hamilton is still on the case, reporting about the declining auto industry.

ESPlanner, a long term financial planning website, though the site isn't always working.

Some community colleges offer bachelor's degrees. I like that degrees are becoming less expensive, but they shouldn't be easier to get. This is the classic Spence problem.

Mark Perry gives us a look at real gas prices. It looks like a falling trend since 1919, with some big spikes thrown in. And, note that the spikes take us to about back to the 1919 level anyways.

Fuel efficiency, forecasts, gendered lob losses, April economic summary, and GDP growth rates

Fuel efficiency raises demand, not lower it. Efficiency lowers cost, which raises demand in the long run. I keep thinking that the short run effect should be modeled as a rise in supply, but the narrative doesn't quite fit.

Simeon Djankov says not to pay attention to the forecasts. They lag behind the news, and are thusly not worth much.

Job losses for different genders. Men have lost many more jobs than women, net. Women seem to have more recessioon-proof jobs.

April economic summary in graphs. It seems to me that most of them tell a similar story.

GDP growth rates for beginners. This is really a well-written and easy to understand post, I think.

Chile, debates, housing, oil and recessions, and cognitive skills

Rodrik talks about the Chilean Minister of Finance. He saved during the boom, although it was unpopular, and is now spending the massive savings. Why don't more countries do this?

Alex Tabarrok talks about the debates at Intelligence Squared. I like the concept of the website, though. Get experts to debate issues and provide podcasts. People vote on winners.

Jon Lansner talks about housing, via CR. Prices should bottom out late next year.

James Hamilton points out the connection between oil price spikes and recessions. That's really interesting research.

Some research shows that people with higher cognitive skills perform better economically. Moreover, to the extent that this is a genetic trait, evolution may play a factor in separating people with of cognitive skill levels.

Oil prices, health care

Mark Perry tells us that oil prices are going to stay low for quite some time. I'll admit that he also called oil prices going down about as low as they did, and I didn't think it'd be quite as extreme (if I recall correctly, the actual was somewhere very close to the average of our estimates), and I'll also admit that I don't consider myself an expert in the oil industry, but I don't see the cycle he mentions as everlasting. Eventually, I think oil will be priced out of or nearly out of the market. Since by all estimates there's a limited amount of oil in the world, and it's non-renewable, alternatives must eventually dominate.

Reinhardt gives a health care reform option, without being quite socialized. It seems to me that there are a number of feasible options, but the trick is finding any that are politically popular. I suppose it's all in bipartisanship and PR.

Consumer spending, demand, and markups

Carter Dougherty at Economix mentions that we've been seeing a decline in consumer spending during this recession--an historical oddity. I read once that consumer spending doesn't change much because most of what we buy, we have to buy. We don't buy a washing machine or a sandwich because we merely want these goods, we buy them because we need clean clothes or are hungry. So much for that idea! As credit increases what we are able to buy, we buy proportionally fewer necessities. When credit dries up, we have fewer means with which to buy stuff. Credit causes consumption to be more volative.

Andrew Cassel reports that the cause of the 2008 oil spike may have been demand expectations in developing countries. Developing countries were growing much faster than expected, which caused future demand expectations to become very high.

Mark Perry reports on the markup on iPod devices. iSuppli is a firm that takes apart devices and estimates how much the components would cost, to try to estimate the cost of making such a device.

Blogging, eating, and assorted stuff

Another interesting piece on blogging in economics from the Economist. Departments are typically measure prestige in their research output, but blogging reaches more people faster. Also, schools may have a comparative advantage in blogging rather than in research.

Should I be less amused when bankers are eating at McDonald's?

Contrary to what might be implied in Michael Mandel's article, Bloomberg reports that Texans will not be eating out less.

James Hamilton at Econbrowser attempts to put a trillion dollars in perspective for us. He reports that the IRS collected a trillion dollars in income taxes in 2006. So, imagine having to pay that much in income taxes.

I'm a sucker for silly. This post from the World Bank explains to us why we shouldn't fear ghosts. Thanks for clearing that up for us, Ryan Hahn. Ghostly revenge makes me feel safer.

The Secretary of Energy predicts rising demand for oil over the next two decades.

Houston is apparently the second largest home-building market in the nation. Katy's doing pretty well!

2.79 Quintillion.

That's Zimbabwe's inflation rate. Yowza! That's 2,790,000,000,000,000,000%. I didn't even know what came after quadrillion! That's just a ludicrous number. I half expect the Cato Institute to update the page with, "Just kidding!" Oh, and the link goes to a new blog in the econoblogsphere, Crisis Talk. When they linked their source on the 29th, it was 10 quadrillion percent.

The WSJ shows that states in which housing prices have fallen are voting for Obama, and states in which housing prices have risen are voting for McCain. I wonder if the economy as a major issue drove states to vote for Obama, or if states predisposed to voting for McCain have more responsible lenders.

Robert Shiller at the NYT talks about Greenspan's self-admitted mistake. Though Greenspan says that their models did not predict the housing bubble, Shiller points out that people hinted at it, but the warnings were ignored. Contrary views are unpopular, and when you're a policy maker, you are less likely to want to risk your job with contrary views.

Mark Perry at Carpe Diem quotes an energy economist who claims that oil will go down to $20-25. It's around $66 now, and it was $140 not too long ago. I find it difficult to believe it will go down to $20.

Houston: We're so great.

According to the Department of Labor, Houston has seen the second strongest job growth in the past 12 months. That's really good!

And, if you weren't impressed by that, there's a new book out to tell people why Houston's great. I wonder how widely it'll be distributed.

There are apparently projects to make the city more green, too, at affordable prices. Interesting!

In other news, ConocoPhillips is getting out of retail gas.

Economics is all about how everything is linked to everything else. If you cut taxes for the poor, they can more easily afford education, meaning a more educated populous, meaning a higher skilled workforce, and thusly higher GDP (just as an example). Hurricane Gustav may have hurt parts of Louisiana, but it's also affected the shrimping industry.

Interesting news.

I think this is an interesting news bit that won't get enough air time, but the EU antitrust chief is apparently a fan of open standards. While he may push for open standards, the statement probably is not going to have much of an effect on actual business practices. Still, the more people who are aware of open options, the better.

I predicted before that the recession, if there was one, ended at least a month ago (not that we're recovering already, but we're probably in a trough). It's worth noting, though, that while businesses may be bouncing back or adjusting, the adjustment period is the part of the cycle that is most painful on the population. We'll feel the effects of the recession for maybe six to nine months after the recession is over (again, the numbers are my prediction). Some evidence is recently provided by Paul Krugman in his blog. And, some evidence for why I think we're in a trough rather than a recession (this is not nearly exhaustive): positive growth (more recently it's been adjusted up, too) and strong or seemingly unaffected production. And, according to recent news, the Fed and gold/commodity prices might agree with me. Note that I'm not saying the economy is doing well, just that the term 'recession' is not an accurate description of the current economy.

And, some interesting oil-related articles. Krugman, NYT, Mankiw, Forbes. I find that Forbes article particularly interesting because it mentions that Bernanke's implication that rates will rise in the future has strengthened the dollar, which in turn has lowered the cost of oil.

I thought this was interesting: Economists and their investments. They're apparently not bad.

Lastly, can I talk about economics and not politics? Yes, but it's more difficult when we're so close to elections. I'll just mention that I like Obama's economic advising staff, and it just got a boost. Obama should consider himself lucky, I think, and if this sort of thing was more publicized, Obama would have the edge on economic policy issues. Not that presidents have much control over that sort of thing, but it's one of those things people talk about.

Edit: Looks a little more definitive that Bernanke agrees with me.