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Missing Deflation and the Argument for Inflation
Absence of deflation argues for more inflation.Why the Fed will not raise interest rates.
I will go to work next.
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Mild Winters and Crank Economics
Neil
Irwin writes about migration patterns within the United States, and
points out that they overwhelmingly reflect just two factors. Most
important, people are moving to places with mild winters:
On top of this,
they’re moving to places with cheap housing, although you need to allow
for the fact that some places are cheap precisely because people are
leaving.
As I pointed out
the other day, this long-term movement toward the sun, in turn,
probably has a lot to do with the gradual adjustment to air
conditioning.
And as I also pointed
out, the search for mild winters can lead to a lot of spurious
correlations. With the exception of California — which has mild winters
but also, now, has very high housing prices — America’s warm states are
very conservative. And that’s not an accident: warm states were also
slave states and members of the Confederacy, and a glance at any
election map will tell you that in US politics the Civil War is far from
over.
The point, then, is
that these hot red states also tend to be low-minimum-wage,
low-taxes-on-the-wealthy jurisdictions. And that opens the door to
sloppy and/or mendacious claims that low wages and taxes are driving
their growth.
This really shouldn’t even be controversial — I think it’s kind of obvious.
