The Federal Reserve, along with most other central banks, including the Bank of England and the European Central Bank, have been mis-measuring inflation for years. And there's a compelling case that their mis-measurement led, albeit indirectly, to the housing boom and bust, and therefore to the 2008 recession.

I...

From John Milton's Paradise Lost to YouTube, there is beautiful math behind cultural phenomena.

Consider the long s, that archaic letter which looked like an f or integral sign. It once appeared in words where an s fell at the beginning or middle of...

Will the second decade of the twentieth century be the decade of "Manufacture, Baby, Manufacture"?

It seems increasingly that way -- I had referenced the unusual recovery in manufacturing employment since the 2008 recession in an offhand way in my post on industry-level signaling, and that sparked my curiosity...

America is having the wrong conversation about corporate taxes.

The problem isn't that corporate tax rates are too high, or that these rates are rendering us uncompetitive. This all-too-common story is simply untrue: our effective corporate tax rate in 2011 was 17.4 percent, which is...

An interesting find today when I was looking for something else in the FRED databases: the Congressional Budget Office is forecasting the slowest real recovery in the post-war era, and given trend inflation which does not rise above 2 percent, the slowest nominal recovery in the post-war era.

One of the most important points of consensus in modern macroeconomics is the importance -- indeed, the supremacy -- of productivity. That apparent certainty makes me afraid to even go near this topic, but I am inspired by Tim Duy's recent post on the distributional effects of monetary policy. I...