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Welcome to Pingree's Potato Patch, my online research lab for the study of Detroit's economy. I'll be keeping track of the results of my investigations here, along with collections of useful data. Feel free to leave comments on any of the posts, and if you want to contact me, you can use this form to send me email.
Add Comment 05 August 2010 - Two Quick Notes by David
First, my MathML work has been progressing in fits and starts, writing up a mathematical model of "buy local" economics, which I'll link to soon.
Second, The Atlantic has published an article on apparently nonsensical high-speed trade orders that one firm has been researching since the "Flash Crash" on May 6. It's kind of interesting
Add Comment 15 April 2010 - Just Testing MathML by David
I'm working on some really simple toy models which I'll probably be posting here soon, so I've installed the AsciiMath extension for PmWiki, and I wanted to try it out.
Groovy...
Add Comment 30 March 2010 - A Plutonomy, You Say? by David
An heretofore unknown to me blogger by the name of Jodi Dean recently posted a pair of heretofore unknown to me documents cited in Michael Moore's hertofore unseen by me newest documentary Capitalism: A Love Story. The docs in question (available on Jodi's blog here and here lay out an analysis of the consequences to a macroeconomy of a large and growing portion of it being determined by the choices of its wealthiest participants. Naked Capitalism (to whom I was pointed by Brad Delong has some commentary on these, but I've yet to read them; I just wanted to share. Once I've read them I may have something to say...
Add Comment 26 March 2010 - American Dream 2.0 - A World Where Your Children Do Exactly As Well As You Did by David
Brad Delong linked to a recent OECD posting of their most recent Economic Policy Reforms document, which features a chapter on intergenerational income mobility. Sadly but not surprisingly, it finds that individuals' economic opportunities are anchored much more solidly to those of their parents in the US than in most European nations.
Categories: Blog, Concentration
Add Comment 25 March 2010 - Sadly Familiar Statistics by David
Lou Novak, a friend from the Green Party, posted a link to a page at UC Santa Cruz discussing the distribution of income and wealth in the US. You should go read it; I'll wait...
Anyway, I want to point out that the last 25-30 years, when the bottom 80% of the economy received only 6% of the economic growth, corresponds to a period during which the Federal Reserve used inflation targeting at around a 3% level to set interest rates. Wages are a component of inflation, whereas dividends and capital gains are not.
I'm increasingly of the opinion that the Fed's (mostly justified) focus on maintaining stable inflation has contributed significantly to the stagnation in wages for the last 3 decades: how the hell is the average worker supposed to see any significant increase in income if labor markets tight enough to justify wage increases directly result in interest rates increasing to loosen them?
Another argument in favor of employee ownership...
Add Comment 28 February 2010 - This Is Only Another Test by David
Ok, I think I've got this working now.
Add Comment 26 February 2010 - Krugman Explains Core Inflation by David
This posting by Paul Krugman does what I described in the post title, quickly and efficiently. I found it useful in refining my understanding a bit, so here's your chance to follow suit.
Add Comment 12 February 2010 - David's Brain: Greece + Groceries = Detroit by David
I was just reading about the Euro crisis again on Brad DeLong's blog, and I had a thought. The basic narrative from DeLong and Krugman regarding the Euro is that most of the countries having problems right now had major price runups during the pre-implosion period due to capital inflows, and now that the economy has declined the only way they can recover is either
- massive deflation, which will be accompanied by a lot of pain to their citizens, and possibly trigger complete collapse, or
- the big Euro countries (particularly Germany) boost their consumption, increasing their imports from the rest of Europe, and thus improve the intra-Euro trade balance of the smaller countries.
This idea of within-currency import/export balances got me thinking about Detroit's situation. In some regards we're in the some position as the PIIGS, needing to export more to the rest of the US to gain ground. The flip side is spinning up economic activity by capturing a larger portion of the economic cycles we're already involved in, basically the local-based economics ideas taking hold in Detroit; I guess at the national level that would essentially take the form of protectionist policies, which I assume are blocked by the EU agreements.
None of this is brilliant, just a parallel which jumped out at me that seemed worth recording. It also reminds me of the need to brush up on small-country fixed exchange rate trade policy, which I've been meaning to do for a while.
Add Comment 11 January 2010 - The NYTimes Says Nice Things About Detroit by David
Mary just pointed me to a New York Times article profiling the entrepreneurial movement in Detroit. It's pretty nifty.