econcrit

CNN, 9 January 2024, has Trump saying "I don’t want to be Herbert Hoover." CNN adds: "The US
stock market crashed during former President Herbert Hoover’s first year in office in 1929, which
signaled the beginning of the Great Depression." See my work on the Trump Depression

Friday, July 11, 2025

I don't understand Trump's focus on cutting federal employment

This Graph at FRED: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1KqWl
at July 11, 2025 No comments:
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Wednesday, July 2, 2025

How it was in 1962

"Congressional costs since 1953 have risen six times as fast as the rest of the federal budget"
Worth Bingham
at July 02, 2025 No comments:
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  • Why economists must think in terms of the cycle of civilization
    I've been hearing the phrase "late capitalism" for so long that I'm forced to conclude that the very concept of late cap...
  • Not the rate of interest, but the cost of finance. Not inflation, but the decline of growth.
    It is surely true that the price level cannot rise without a corresponding increase in the quantity of money or velocity or use of credit. ...
  • The most important difference between cost-push and demand-pull inflation
    I'm not a fan of "diagrams" in economics, but sometimes... This is a screen capture of slide 36 from a SlideShare presentatio...
  • Similarities in Wage Growth: The 1990-91 Recession and the Great Recession
    Mark Thoma links to the Kansas City Fed's Nominal Wage Rigidities and the Future Path of Wage Growth by José Mustre-del-Río and Emily ...
  • Looks like vigor to me
    Went to Harbor Freight the other day. When I left, there was so much traffic I had to fight my way out of the parking lot -- at one p.m. on ...

Federal debt is the measure of economic troubles in the private sector, not the cause of them. The cause is excessive private-sector debt. Private debt is too big and too costly. It slows the economy. It slows income growth. It makes decent jobs scarce. We lost our greatness to excessive private-sector debt. We can regain American greatness by reducing private debt, if we do so before China has all the greatness.

Note that we have many policies to encourage the use of credit, and no policies to encourage repayment of debt.


  • Selected FRED Data
  • Free ebooks forever:  Fadedpage
  • Levy Institute Publications
  • Art's old VIGOR page
Click folder tab to view contents:
 Quick Quotes on Debt
Hover for the quote. Click for the source.
Steve Keen
Thomas Palley
Palley again (same source)
Arthurian (spontaneous)
Arthurian
 A.J. Toynbee, A Study of History
Unabridged Vol 1 ... Page 1
Abridgement Vol 1 thru 10
 Mostly old Cost-Push stuff
1937: The General Theory of Employment
1958: The Phillips Curve Paper
1959: Charles Schultze, "Recent Inflation in the United States"
1960: Richard Lipsey on the Phillips curve
1960: Samuelson and Solow, "Problem of Achieving and Maintaining a Stable Price Level"
1962: Arthur Okun, "Potential GDP: Its Measurement and Significance"
1968: Friedman's Presidential Address: The Role of Monetary Policy or Alt Link
1970: Milton Friedman, The Counter-Revolution in Monetary Theory
1974: F.A. Hayek Prize Lecture, The Pretense of Knowledge
1977: Thomas M. Humphrey, On Cost-Push Theories of Inflation in the Pre-War Monetary Literature
 Papers by Johannes A. Schwarzer
Samuelson and Solow on the Phillips Curve and the “Menu of Choice”: A Retrospective (2013)
Growth as an objective of economic policy in the early 1960s : the role of aggregate demand (2014)
Price Stability versus Full Employment:The Phillips Curve Dilemma Reconsidered (2016)
Retrospectives: Cost-Push and Demand-Pull Inflation: Milton Friedman and the “Cruel Dilemma” (2018)
 Papers by Norikazu Takami: 1950s Cost-Push
Baffling Inflation: Cost-push Inflation Theories in the Late 1950s United States (2014)
 The Baffling New Inflation: How Cost-push Inflation Theories Influenced Policy Debate in the Late-1950s United States (2015)
 Archive.org links
Archive.org home
NOTE: At archive.org the upper-right-corner "search" is for all of archive.org. To search the open book, click the search icon on the left side of the window, and use quotes around search phrases.
Historical Statistics thru 1970 Part 1

Arrighi, G: The Long Twentieth Century
Dalio, R: Economic Principles: How the Economic Machine Works
DeLong, H: A Profile of Mathematical Logic
R. C. K. Ensor: England 1870-1914
Finley, M. I.: The Ancient Economy
Friedman, M: Free to Choose
Friedman, M: Money Mischief
Kissinger, H: The meaning of history: reflections on Spengler, Toynbee and Kant
Leuchtenburg, W: Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal
Leuchtenburg, W: The Perils of Prosperity
Lot, Ferdinand: The End of the Ancient World and the Beginnings of the Middle Ages
Montagu, A: Toynbee And History: Critical Essays And Reviews
Mullineux, A.W.: Business Cycles and Financial Crises
Quigley, The Evolution of Civilizations
Rostovtzeff, The Social And Economic History Of The Roman Empire
Terborgh, George: The New Economics
Tooke, Thomas: An Inquiry into the Currency Principle
Toynbee, AJ: A Study of History (Volumes I-VI abridged)
Wanniski, Jude: The Way the World Works
 Timelines
Industrial Capitalism
Mercantile Capitalism
10000 years of economy
 Blog Themes
"And on the pedestal these words appear:
'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains..." - Shelley

"Toynbee maintained that the fate of civilizations is determined by their response to the challenges facing them." -- Stefan Zenker

"the ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else." - J.M. Keynes

"Economic policy encourages credit use and discourages the repayment of debt. That's how we in the private sector got so indebted." - Nathan Becker



"Attempts to describe complex interactions in the economy with overly simple adages can lead to incorrect conclusions." - Meyer and Tasci

"I remarked that a plurality of suffrages is no guarantee of truth where it is at all of difficult discovery, as in such cases it is much more likely that it will be found by one than by many." - Descartes

"I have thought it important, not only to explain my own point of view, but also to show in what respects it departs from the prevailing theory." - J.M. Keynes

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For Reference:

• ArmstrongEconomics on ancient interest rates
• Michael Hudson on ancient interest rates
• Schmelzing: 700 years of Real Interest Rates
• Schmelzing: The ‘suprasecular’ stagnation
• Schmelzing: Eight centuries of global real interest rates
• Commentary on the long trend of interest rates and Schmelzing's work, at The Daily Reckoning
• When did sustained growth start?
• Europe's rise to riches (VOXEU)
• Harbingers of modernity: monetary injections and European economic growth, 1492-1790
• From convergence to divergence: Portuguese economic growth, 1527-1850
• Religious change preceded economic change in the 20th century
• Economics of Medieval Guilds, with links.
• Taking Malthus seriously: "helps to explain the economic stagnation from the dark ages to the industrial revolution."
• Andy Blunden’s Home Page.

On Ancient Rome:
• Ancient Rome’s Collapse Is Written Into Arctic Ice at The Atlantic via Reddit
• Also via Reddit, The Ups & Downs of Ancient Rome’s Economy–All 1,900 Years at Open Culture -- see links at end of article.
• Capitalism without Classes: The Case of Classical Rome: "Rome during the last two centuries of the Republic and the first two of the Principate was an unequivocally capitalist society in the sense that it was based on the private ownership of property and the transaction of social relations through the market."
At Priceonomics: How Maritime Insurance Built Ancient Rome

On Medieval Life and Agriculture:
• The Peasants: Advances in Agricultural Technology, 800-1000
• The Laxton Village Survey
• Farming in the Middle Ages
• The Nature and Limits of the Money Economy in Late Anglo-Saxon and Early Norman England

My Simulations
• Interest Rate

Art was here

Graph Techniques

HP in a FRED graph

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