Why Did Simon Kuznets Want to Leave Military Spending out of GDP?
Simon Kuznets (Nobel 1971) usually gets the credit for doing as much as anyone to organize our modern thinking about what should be included in GDP, or left out. But I had not known that Kuznets apparently argued for leaving military spending out of GDP, on the grounds that it wasn't actually "consumed" by anyone, but should instead be treated as an intermediate input that supported production and consumption. Here's how Hugh Rockoff tells the story in his essay, "On the Controversies behind the Origins of the Federal Economic Statistics," in the Winter 2019 issue of the Journal of Economic Perspectives. [Full disclosure: I work at JEP as Managing Editor.] Rockoff writes:
- 06/02/2019
- 3
Why Have Other Countries Been Dropping Their Wealth Taxes?
A wealth tax is what it sounds like: a tax imposed not on income, but on wealth. The standard economic definition of wealth includes both nonfinancial assets like real estate and financial assets like stocks and bonds. Thus, a wealth tax doesn't care if the value of someone's wealth went up or down in the last year/ It is not a tax on the transfer of wealth to others, like an inheritance tax or a gift tax. It is just imposed on the amount of wealth.
- 05/02/2019
- 5
The Puzzle of the US Productivity Slowdown
In the long-run, the average standard of living in an economy is determined by the average productivity of its workers. For example, Paul Krugman started Chapter 1 of his 1990 book, The Age of Diminished Expectations, by stating: "Productivity isn't everything, but in the long run it is almost everything. A country's ability to improve its standard of living over time depends almost entirely on its ability to raise its output per worker."
- 05/02/2019
- 3
Digitization of Media Industries: Quantity and Quality
Digitization has revolutionized media industries. The equipment needed to produce a movie, television show, or musical album has gotten remarkably cheaper. The cost of distributing video, sound, or text has dropped dramatically, too, in some cases to nearly zero. In addition, the power of the "gatekeepers" who used to determine what content would be broadly distributed--producers and publishers--has been substantially diminished.
- 31/01/2019
- 5
How Food Banks Use Markets
"Imagine that someone gave you 300 million pounds of food and asked you to distribute it to the poor—through food banks—all across the United States. The nonprofit Feeding America faces this problem every year. The food in question is donated to Feeding America by manufacturers and distributors across the United States. As an example, a Walmart in Georgia could have 25,000 pounds of excess tinned fruit at one of its warehouses and give it to Feeding America to distribute to one of 210 regional food banks. How should this be accomplished?"
- 30/01/2019
- 7
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