Your morning economics lesson

This morning, Larry was reading Greg Mankiw’s NY Times editorial on 45’s tax plan. Mankiw is an economics professor at Harvard.  To familiarize me with Mankiw, Larry played a country western economics song, Dual Mandate for me. I guess he was directed to this from reading Mankiw, and I incorrectly reported it as Greg. An alert reader (thanks, Dan) caught the error, but the video is still worth watching.

And Mankiw’s editorial in the Times is worth reading.

I don’t know any good poems on economics or business. As Dana Gioia has pointed out, business is the last taboo subject for poetry. I have one poem about money, and so you don’t miss a Monday poem, here it is.

Meditation on Money

I am thinking about a day forty years ago
when we were down to our last fifty cents,
and our friends drove up
with a month’s rent and groceries,
and after we ate and talked, we sat together
on the edge of the dock, saying nothing,
and watched the barnacles
slowly open their feathery lips,
slowly close them.

Meryl Natchez

Dual Mandate

Screen Shot 2015-07-24 at 10.35As a graduate of the Father Guido Sarducci’s 5-minute University, I was really happy that Larry introduced me to the issue of the Fed’s dual mandate in a way I could understand. Greg Mankiw, a Harvard Professor of Economics, has created a video to explain the thorny problem for our Federal Reserve, initially created to keep our currency stable and control inflation. Now, the additional mandate of keeping unemployment low has been added, and Greg explains this in a delightful country western song. Now I’m up to speed on current economics.