Economists James Hamilton and Menzie Chinn write about macroeconomics, monetary policy, oil prices, and current economic conditions.
HN commenters recommend it as a source of analysis on current economic conditions and policy, though one says it has less content than HN.
> The reason scientists don't blog a lot, or comment on blogs, is that...
So, now that I've read the comments on a few of these open-access type articles, it seems like there is so much variation among academic disciplines that broad statements about "scientists" are untrue in many cases and probably isn't a helpful way to phase things. This statement is not true in every field: in Economics (my field, you can decide whether or not we are "scientists," but we certainly try to publish in peer-reviewed journals) there are many blogs by extremely accomplished and prominent Economists. They get a lot of informal but meaningful credit for it, in some cases much more than another top publication would bring (when you go from zero to one or one to two top-tier articles, it affects your career. When you go from 31 to 32, not so much).
Just for specifics: Jim Hamilton at UCSD (my alma mater) started and contributes to the blog http://www.econbrowser.com. His graduate students started landing order-of-magnitude better jobs and interviews once the blog was established (and, just to make clear that it's not sour grapes on my part since most of them are my friends: these are jobs that the students are quite well qualified for; I think previous students if anything got too little exposure). It's a great blog that's really well regarded among Economists, and everyone I've asked thinks that the blog is bringing him a lot of (IMO deserved) attention.
> This de-prioritization of peer…
> https://www.shadowstats.com/
No. Just No.
First off the math makes absolutely no sense:
> But if we take away the outlier 2020 data points, the average real annual GDP growth from 2010-2019 was 2.3%. The inflation rate in that time averaged roughly 1.8% per year.
> If you’re one of the conspiracy people who believe inflation has actually been running at 5-6% per year, that would assume the economy has been contracting by 1-3% per year over the past 10 years.
> And if you’re a full tinfoil hat person who assumes inflation is actually 10-12% per year[2], that’s like saying we’ve been in a full-blown depression and the economy has lost 80% of its value.
* https://awealthofcommonsense.com/2021/01/inflation-truthers/
Second, the methodology is all wrong:
* https://www.fullstackeconomics.com/p/no-the-real-inflation-rate-isnt-14-percent
As much as you can call it a "methodology" of taking the official CPI number and adding your own, which the author of the site admits to:
> I’m not going back and recalculating the CPI. All I’m doing is going back to the government’s estimates of what the effect would be and using that as an add factor to the reported statistics.
* http://econbrowser.com/archives/2008/10/shadowstats_res
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadowstats.com#Negative
Further, the current price of a subscription to the 'full report' is $175/year right now, the same as it was in 2014:
*…
Trillion dollar coin or no coin, the debt ceiling attempts to regulate (in part) expenditures already authorized by Congress and signed into law. It's a tempest in a teapot for one party in Congress to argue that it's irresponsible to conduct authorized expenditures, because in fact, Congress did authorize the expenditures.
The two transactions, debt providing cash to the government, and seigniorage (difference in value from the metal in the coin and the fiat value asserted) providing cash to the government for the coin issuance are approximately equally inflationary, over time, assuming that the debt remains outstanding. If such a coin were undertaken, in all probability, it would be repurchased by the Treasury and retired, and debt would be issued. Indeed, the a return of the coin to the Treasury could be via issuance of debt directly to the Federal Reserve.
A little perspective on Federal Reserve Bank's process to create cash:
Federal Reserve Balance Sheet - by James Hamilton on Econobrowser
http://www.econbrowser.com/archives/2008/12/federal_reserve_1.html
I don't think it is as near or going to be as bad as some people think, but with caveats.
Listening to the guy who the big short was based on now, my main takeaway is that the banks deleveraged significantly since 07/08, down to ~11 vs ~30 then. Of course, part of the problem is they were using financial tricks to cover up bad assets... so I think they might be more leveraged than they are letting on.
Second, the legislation afterwards only really did one thing: make the "fix", aka fed bailout, automatic. This means there should be less time between drop and recovery. At the same time, it creates incentive for bankers to be more reckless.
Politically, midterms are always about the economy at heart. If Trump is serving Wall Street well enough they will try to keep him propped up for 2020, and would probably try to delay the big dip till either right after or till 2023/24.
https://econbrowser.com/archives/2019/06/recession-anxieties-june-2019
https://www.investmentwatchblog.com/rosenberg-on-lagged-effects-of-fed-tightening-corporate-deleveraging/
I'll admit, I didn't even click on your link, but rather went by your claimed range:
> Government stated inflation based on chained CPI and other new measures to reduce inflation may be at around 2%, but previous formulas used in the past to calculate inflation would show a much higher rate (6-10%)
I'm not here to quibble about inflation ranges, but to point out how idiotic their 'methodology' is. Don't take my word for it;
James Hamilton (CV: http://econweb.ucsd.edu/~jhamilton/) - http://econbrowser.com/archives/2008/09/shadowstats_deb
Greenlees and McClelland (Who actually designed the CPI methodology) - http://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2008/08/art1full.pdf
Or my favorite, via the libertarian blogger James Parsons. If you actually use Shadowstat's inflation ranges, you can 'back-calculate' the price of assets to show how insane they actually are:
* If shadow stats inflation assertions are correct, the 'real' value of housing has dropped 60% since 1980!
[1] - http://blog.jparsons.net/2011/03/shadow-stats-debunked-part-i.html
Here's both real average hourly (red) and median weekly (blue) wages:
https://econbrowser.com/archives/2021/08/yet-more-alternative-real-wage-series-through-time
Helps to show that it's not an effect dominated by the very rich, and thus throwing off the average, and also that it's not that hourly wages have stagnated but people work more hours -- since they're broadly similar, we should feel strongly that it is a real increase in "normal people's" actual wages.
There are more data available if people want to look for it. This is a surprisingly complex subject for something that initially sounds simple, so it helps to get a few different views into it, but the upshot is: since the teens, people have been paid more.
EDIT to add: People are just slow to update on this. If you look at the world in 2014, then it seems a lot more reasonable to be skeptical that normal people will ever get a raise. Then, you'd had basically 15 year of stagnation, before that a little rise, and then more years of stagnation at a lower level.