faulker020

In February, I wrote a Bloomberg View post called " The Myth of the Immigration Crisis " that got a fair bit of attention. In it, I wrote: Illegal immigration to the U.S. ended a decade ago and, according to the Pew Research Center, has been zero or negative since its peak in 2007:  About a million undocumented immigrants left the country in the Great Recession. But even after the end of the recession, illegal immigration didn’t resume. Now, my Twitter buddy Lyman Stone of the USDA has written a post alleging that my post is "bad" and "false" . Well, my mom always told me "Son, don't **** with the USDA," and that advice has served me well for many years. However, given the importance of this issue, I may have to ignore my mother's wise words, and rebut Lyman's post. Which won't be that hard to do, because Lyman, being the perspicacious fellow he is, in fact agrees with me on almost every substantive point. In which Lyman agrees wi...

While I was in Norway to give a talk about macroeconomics , an interdisciplinary group at the University of Oslo also invited me to give a talk about whether economics is a science or not. That's an impossible question, of course, since there's no official definition of what "a science" is. But I did have some thoughts on the matter. Here are the slides from the talk:     These slides don't speak for themselves quite as much as the macro slides did, and the topic is much broader and more vague, so I'll turn it into a full post. This post mostly just explains the slides. What the heck is a "science"? No one knows. Because no one has ever really been able to make one dominant definition of science stick. Some people define it as a method (e.g. Popper), some as a sociological phenomenon (Kuhn, Lakatos), and others don't even see much need for a definition (Feyerabend). And there are plenty of other opinions too. So the argument over whether economic...

I'd like to close the chapter of my life that involves complaining about macroeconomics. I've been out of that world long enough that it's becoming a distant memory. And much more qualified critics are on the job. Furthermore, macroeconomists I talk to - especially young macroeconomists - mostly seem to have heard and internalized all of the critiques. That doesn't mean I want to stop following developments in the macro field, but that my days as a certified "macro-basher" have come to an end. So when the Norwegian Finance Ministry, Norges Bank and Statistics Norway asked me to give a talk about "What Has Happened in Macroeconomics (and what still needs to be done)", I viewed it as an opportunity to sum up. Here are the slides from that talk. Enjoy.

In response to the tragic Portland stabbing , I wrote a Twitter thread praising the two men who died defending Muslim women on a train. I pointed out that one of the heroes was a Republican army vet, while the other was a liberal hippie type. I lamented that our current national political discourse so often sets decent guys like this against each other, and wished that liberals and conservatives could put aside their mutual suspicions and unite at the political level to defend the country against white supremacism, fascism, and the general madness brought on by the age of Trump. This thread was very well-received, getting about 2000 retweets, 3300 likes, and numerous mostly favorable quote-tweets. Nevertheless, there were some who were dissatisfied with the thread. A few dozen people on the left wrote to complain that I was engaging in "both-sides-ism", i.e. putting too little of the blame for the country's woes on the average Republican voter. Some accused me of being a...