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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lane3 who wrote (25657)	7/31/2006 5:49:23 PM
From: TimF	Respond to of 541559

I stumbled into the Wikipedia article about Mankiw. I wasn't looking him up, but rather looking at some economic subjectes. "...Mankiw is a New Keynesian economist. He did important work on menu costs, which are a source of price stickiness, one of the fundamental tenets of the New Keynesian economics (not necessarily of Keynes' economics). In 1989, he wrote a paper arguing that the aging of the baby boomers was going to undermine the housing market in the 1990s and 2000s. His advocacy at the CEA of tax cuts even in the face of large deficits led some other economists, such as Paul Krugman and J. Bradford DeLong, to criticize him as in thrall to Bush administration policies. Mankiw has become increasingly influential in the Blogosphere and online journalism since launching his blog. The blog, while ostensibly prepared to assist his Ec10 students, has managed to gain a readership that extends far beyond students of introductory economics. [edit] Controversy Several controversies arose from CEA's February 2004 Economic Report of the President.[1] In a press conference, Mankiw spoke of the gains from free trade, noting that outsourcing of jobs by U.S. companies is "probably a plus for the economy in the long run."[2][3] While this reflected mainstream economic analysis, it was criticized by many people who drew a link between outsourcing and the still-slow recovery of the U.S. labor market in early 2004. The White House economic forecast contained in the report was criticized for being overly optimistic about job gains--and indeed, job growth turned out to be slower than the Administration forecast. Controversy also arose from a rhetorical question posed by the report (and repeated by Mankiw in a speech [4] about the report): "when a fast-food restaurant sells a hamburger, is it providing a service or combining inputs to manufacture a product?" The intended point was that the distinction between manufacturing and service industry is somewhat arbitrary and therefore a poor basis for policy. Even though the issue was not raised in the report, a news account [5] led to criticism that the Administration was seeking to cover up job losses in manufacturing by redefining jobs such as flipping hamburgers as manufacturing." en.wikipedia.org