The following posts have been selected by the editors. These posts include articles about Hoover scholars but not written by them. Others are about the Hoover Institution or this site.
Preeminent scholar of American politics and the presidency, James W. Ceaser, assess four scenarios for the national political situation on the day after the November election. Taking stock of what lies ahead after either an Obama or Romney win (and a wide or narrow margin victory for each candidate), Ceaser considers three main questions:
What is the larger meaning and significance of the election?
What can the winner reasonably claim about the election outcome?
What does the outcome augur for the defeated party?
With an introduction by Tad and Dianne Taube Director of the Hoover Institution, John Raisian.
By historical standards, the current recovery from the recession that began in 2007 has been disappointing. As John Taylor of Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and the Department of Economics argues in Part 1 of this discussion on the economy, GDP has not returned to trend, the percent of the population that is working is flat rather than rising, and growth rates are below their usual levels after such a deep slump.
In this episode, Taylor and Number’s Game host Russ Roberts discuss possible explanations for the sluggish recovery: the ongoing slump in construction employment, the effect of housing prices on saving and spending decisions by households, and this recovery’s having been preceded by a financial crisis. Taylor rejects these arguments, arguing instead that the sluggish recovery can be explained by poor economic policy decisions made by the Bush and the Obama administrations.
1) On the argument that there are structural problems in the labor market (0:25)
2) Comparisons to the 1981 recession (2:16)
3) Is this recession special because it followed a financial crisis? (2:46)
4) What can the Great Depression tell us? (3:55)
5) Why is the current recovery so mediocre? (5:32)
According the National Bureau of Economic Research, the US economy recovered from the recession at the beginning of the summer of 2009. Yet the recovery has been disappointing when compared to other recoveries. In this episode of the Numbers Game, John Taylor of Stanford University talks with host Russ Roberts about the nature of the recovery. How does it compare historically to other recoveries? How can we measure the pace of the recovery? The conversation ends with a discussion of possible explanations for why the recovery has been disappointing.
1907-08 and 1893-94 Recession & Recovery Charts: GDP data from NBER, compiled by Nathan Balke and Robert Gordon with adjustments by John Taylor for comparability with earlier charts -http://www.nber.org/data/abc/ Potential GDP calculations by John Taylor using a Hodrick-Prescott trend.
And Milton Friedman in his own words on Uncommon Knowledge and in the Wall Street Journal with a piece about monetary policy that he penned, based on his academic work, at the age of 94 – and was published the day after his death.
In the pages of the WSJ, Ed Lazear makes the strongest cases that Obama and Romney can argue about the U.S. economy. The reader can decide: slow recovery or failed agenda?
A must read: Charles Murray’s feature in the WSJ Weekend edition, “Why capitalism has an image problem?” Another must read: Hoover fellow David Henderson’s Real Clear Policyop-ed about the crony capitalism that Murray indicts. Start with Henderson’s concise argument about how cronyism destroys wealth. Keep reading with Henderson’s recently released research paper on why cronyism occurs.
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necessarily reflect the views of the Hoover Institution or Stanford University.
