Tag Archives: macroeconomics

James Galbraith on inflation

Here is what James Galbraith (an economist at the University of Texas, whose name is always given with the middle initial of K, but I find that a bit pompous) says is causing inflation:

  • high oil prices (“oil” being shorthand for gasoline, fuel oil, and natural gas) driven by pandemic recovery and cut-backs in shale oil/gas production. A short-term solution is to sell from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to stabilize prices. He says shale production will pick up driven by market forces now that prices are high.
  • commodity speculation. Solution is regulation.
  • military spending. This is a good point – he says we are spending $700 billion per year on “weapons and defense”, and I suspect this number would be over a trillion per year if you consider all defense, intelligence, security and nuclear weapons spending as a whole, which is scatter across the government beyond the Department of Defense. Something that irritates me – why do we talk about the infrastructure investment and social spending bills Congress is considering as totals over a decade or more, which leads to a sticker shock effect, but defense spending on an annual basis, if we talk about it all? I AM GOING TO SPEND OVER ONE HUNDRED THOUSAND DOLLARS ON MY HOUSE OVER THE NEXT DECADE!!! But my monthly payment is something I can (just barely, not particularly comfortably) afford on my income, and that is how I think and plan my life and family finances. Democrats seem to think the big numbers have a kind of positive shock value showing that they are doing big, bold things. But Republicans just incoherently scream SPENDING!!! and INFLATION!!! and that communication strategy seems to be winning. (My 30-year fixed rate monthly mortgage payment is going to seem less spectacular, by the way, in a world where a bag of groceries costs $100 or more, which seems to be where we are headed. My wife and I are relying on a lot of prepared food and takeout these days, because I am working full time to maintain our private health insurance and other benefits, and we are raising small children in the richest country in the world without a childcare program. Also, our dishwasher is broken and due to the supposed labor shortage, the repair has been postponed several times even though the part is available. We are grateful that we are healthy and well-nourished and have a roof over our heads and realize many people are in much worse situations…)
  • supply chain bottlenecks, including clogged ports. These will work themselves out, although it seems to be a painfully slow process.

He says raising interest rates alone would not be a good solution to any of these problems. He says it is important for wage increases to go to low-paid workers. That certainly seems fair and just, although I am not sure how that is a solution to the problems above.

water, energy, and food in macroeconomic models

Here’s an article on how water, energy, and food fit into macroeconomic models. My basic understanding is that traditionally, they don’t. Production functions focus on labor and capital because these are assumed to explain most of the output, and including water, energy, raw material, and even land prices does not make enough difference to bother with. So the methods exist, but economists generally don’t bother because historical data shows these things don’t make a difference. We have certainly seen short-term and regional price shocks in food and energy that have affected economies. We haven’t really seen a sustained, long-term rise in prices of water, energy, or food, in fact the long term trend has been clearly the opposite. Will climate change begin to reverse this at some point? Or is it already happening but our technology is keeping up? Or is it happening slowly, we are adjusting, but the system is becoming more fragile and we are headed for a sudden panic at some point? Like dead wood building up in a forest – the forest may look okay for a long time, and then one day there is a spark, followed by an intense crisis, and then you are left with ashes…

Critical Reflections on Water-Energy-Food Nexus in Computable General Equilibrium Models: A Systematic Literature Review

The paper analyses how the Water-Energy-Food Nexus is treated in Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) models, discussing their design, importance and possible ways of improvement. The analysis of their structure is critical for evaluating their potential efficiency in understanding the Nexus, which will be particularly effective for gauging the importance of the topic, the reciprocal dependency of its elements and the expected macroeconomic, demographic and climatic pressures that will act on its components. General equilibrium models can be useful devices to this end, as they are specifically built to track interdependencies and transmission effects across sectors and countries. Nevertheless, the review showed that most CGEs in the literature struggle to represent the competing water uses across sectors and, in particular, those concerning the energy sector. Therefore, it highlights the need to resolve this issue as a necessary step toward improving future research.

Environmental Modeling and Software

August 2019 in Review

My work-life balance situation continues to not favor a lot of blog posts. Or is it work-life-family balance? Or is family part of life? Yes, I guess so. Anyway, what there is not a lot of time for is personal leisure activities like reading, writing, and thinking. Not that I don’t enjoy reading Green Eggs and Ham for the 50th time. I do. Anyway, here are a few highlights of the slim pickings that constituted this blog in August 2019. Most frightening and/or depressing story:
  • Drought is a significant factor causing migration from Central America to the United States. Drought in the Mekong basin may put the food supply for a billion people in tropical Asia at risk. One thing that can cause drought is deliberately lying to the public for 50 years while materially changing the atmosphere in a way that enriches a wealthy few at everyone else’s expense. Burning what is left of the Amazon can’t help. 
Most hopeful story:
  • I explored an idea for automatic fiscal stabilizers as part of a bold infrastructure investment plan. I’m not all that hopeful but a person can dream.
Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: