It has been my tradition at this blog to take a break from current events in late August.
About 20 years ago, I found myself (via a story too long and tedious to relate here) part of a small group of economists travelling in South Africa for a week, meeting with various business, government, and academic groups. Within our little group , we each had some topics on which we would focus the first round of our comments. For example, one person talked about how to structure an emerging telecommunications industry, while another talked about barriers to international trade in agriculture. My own role, at least as perceived by the audience, was to be the defender of American imperialist capitalism. And no phrase was delivered to me with quite the same scorn and disdain–and frequency–as “the Washington consensus.”
In the United States, there is no government committee to set the start and end dates of recessions–for obvious political reasons.
This year marks the 50th anniversary since Nixon suspended the convertibility of the USD into Gold.
Income refers to what is received in a certain period of time, which is why we refer to “annual income” or “weekly paycheck.”
David A. Price has an interview with “Ayşegül Şahin: On age growth, labor’s share of income, and the gender unemployment gap” (Econ Focus: Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, Second/Third Quarter 2021, pp. 18-22).
The Congressional Budget Office has published “The Distribution of Household Income, 2018” (August 2021). It takes a couple of years to pull this data together in a reliable way.