Economy
A recent post, Lessons for Rhode Island from Silicon Valley: An historical reflection on an actual innovation economy, discussed what made Silicon Valley’s entrepreneurial culture so unique and what some of its economic growth policy lessons are for Rhode Island. In the latest edition of The Weekly Standard, Thomas Hazlett has written about the book,…
Something has seemed forced — in a “just a bit too perfect” way — about the promise of “green jobs” as some sort of savior of our economy. Ben Lieberman suggests that, even if such jobs do proliferate, they don’t match up with the number of jobs lost to the larger ecological zeitgeist: According to…
With the economic crisis in Rhode Island, there is much talk (e.g., my recent post and Ian Donnis) about what it will take to generate real change and economic growth in the state. Leonard Lardaro, professor of economics at URI, offers his thoughts in a ProJo editorial Only RI Cure: Cut spending and taxes, where…
The immorality of wealth is a notion that has been in the air lately, with the latest example being David Brooks’s lamentation of “The Great Seduction” in the New York Times: The United States has been an affluent nation since its founding. But the country was, by and large, not corrupted by wealth. For centuries,…
It would seem that there’s something cultural about young-adult joblessness: Much of the spike in unemployment was caused by an unusually large surge of teenagers and people in their 20s into the labor force. And those young workers had little success finding work. The jobless rate among 16- to 19-year-olds rose to 18.7 percent from…
Here’s a statement that I’ve read multiple times with reference to “alternative energy”, specifically the bills to provide incentive to National Grid to buy it that have just passed the RI House: Matt Auten of the advocacy group Environment Rhode Island denied that renewable energy would drive up electricity costs, describing the bill instead as…
Dan Yorke had URI Professor Dr. Ed Mazze on yesterday (podcast and related column here), who sketched out how we got in this mess (sub-prime collapse and overall housing problem in RI was the leading cause of recession in the state; 6000 jobs lost since January). Such things contribute to a simultaneous lack of consumer…
There’s a certain wrongheadedness — an insecurity — to the feeling of which Rita Lussier’s expression is merely one example of many: “Yeah, the $4-dollar-a-gallon thing is hard to take,” he says as he puts the hose back on the hook and screws the cover on his tank. All the while, he keeps smiling, smiling,…
From an editorial in today’s Wall Street Journal: [T]he latest news of Michigan’s deepening budget woe is a national warning of what happens when you raise taxes in a weak economy. Officials in Lansing reported this month that the state faces a revenue shortfall between $350 million and $550 million next budget year. This is…
Related to Andrew’s “Finance and Demography” post, I’ve been wondering, lately, how much economic growth of late has relied on increasing debt. Sure, production expands the economy, but somehow it has to correspond with consumption, no? In particular, I’m thinking of Spenlger’s line: “The financial markets, in turn, found ways to persuade Americans to borrow…