More Competition

U Chicago economist John Cochrane is now blogging.

A Half Dozen Short Takes

To bring in the New Year, Sunday's NY Times offers up short pieces by all six economics columnists, including yours truly.

The Burden of the Debt

Paul Krugman has several posts discussing the burden of the national debt.  Some readers have asked me for my take on the topic.  Let me refer them to this old paper I wrote with Larry Ball.  It provides a nontechnical overview.  Even though it is 16 years old, I think it holds up pretty well.

Jeremy Stein to the Fed

President Obama has nominated my Harvard colleague Jeremy Stein to become a Federal Reserve Governor.  This is an excellent choice.  Congratulations, Jeremy!

(The President has also nominated Jerome Powell, whom I do not know.)

How do the rich earn their livings?

Here is an interesting paper that answers the question.  Some highlights from Table 3 about the top 0.1 percent:

• 18 percent are financial professionals.
• 42 percent are executives, managers, or supervisors in nonfinancial businesses. More than half of those are in closely-held (presumably often small) businesses.
• 7 percent are lawyers.
• 6 percent are in medicine.
• 3 percent are in arts, media, or sports.
• Less than 1 percent are professors or scientists.  :(

I win a journalism award

Sort of.  NY Times blogger Gene Marks puts one of my columns on his list of the Best Reads of 2011.

I wish you all a Merry Christmas, and also a New Year full of miracles

Why, who makes much of a miracle?
As to me I know of nothing else but miracles,
Whether I walk the streets of Manhattan,
Or dart my sight over the roofs of houses toward the sky,
Or wade with naked feet along the beach just in the edge of the water,
Or stand under trees in the woods,
Or talk by day with any one I love, or sleep in the bed at night
with any one I love,
Or sit at table at dinner with the rest,
Or look at strangers opposite me riding in the car,
Or watch honey-bees busy around the hive of a summer forenoon,
Or animals feeding in the fields,
Or birds, or the wonderfulness of insects in the air,
Or the wonderfulness of the sundown, or of stars shining so quiet
and bright,
Or the exquisite delicate thin curve of the new moon in spring;
These with the rest, one and all, are to me miracles,
The whole referring, yet each distinct and in its place.

To me every hour of the light and dark is a miracle,
Every cubic inch of space is a miracle,
Every square yard of the surface of the earth is spread with the same,
Every foot of the interior swarms with the same.
To me the sea is a continual miracle,
The fishes that swim--the rocks--the motion of the waves--the
ships with men in them,
What stranger miracles are there?

-- Walt Whitman