South By North Strategies, Ltd.

What What Wrong?

Brad DeLong asks what went wrong with economic education in America.

Rather, the educational problems appear to be concentrated at the graduate level. They ramify: we appear to have produced a professoriate–trained in graduate school–that appears remarkably ill-equipped to survive in the wild, and remarkably ignorant of the utilitarian and emergent foundations of the discipline. Judgments of economic welfare rest on utilitarian foundations. Equilibrium methods rest on equilibrium as an emergent property growing out of individual disequilibrium transactions. Yet a lot of the time professors get these wrong–an elementary mistake of the same order as solving the first-order maximization conditions without bothering to check the second-order conditions.
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And the question is why. And the question is how to fix it.

North Carolina Economic Snapshots

The North Carolina Budget and Tax Center recently released a series of county-level economic snapshots covering the years 2009 and 2010. Each brief provides county-level data about unemployment, poverty, wages and income, housing, health, work supports, and family budgets.

Click here to access the index of county reports.

Around The Dial – 4/7/11

Economic policy reports, blog postings, and media stories of interest:

• Beat the Press see seniors spending all of their income on health care.
• Felix Salmon points out another way to close the deficit.
• The Baseline Scenario look at the latest round in the interchange fee fight.
• The New York Times reports on the tie between work and disability.
• TaxVox points out that everyone benefits from tax breaks.

NC Unemployment Claims: Week of 3/19

For the benefit week ending on March 19th, 11,274 North Carolinians filed initial claims for state unemployment insurance benefits, and 121,002 individuals applied for state-funded continuing benefits. Compared to the prior week, there were fewer initial and continuing claims. These figures come from data released by the U.S. Department of Labor.

Averaging new and continuing claims over a four-week period — a process that helps adjust for seasonal fluctuations and better illustrates trends — shows that an average of  12,907 initial claims were filed over the previous four weeks, along with an average of 124,835 continuing claims. Compared to the previous four-week period, there were fewer initial and continuing claims.

One year ago, the four-week average for initial claims stood at 176,767 and the four-week average of continuing claims equaled 199,953.

While the number of claims has dropped over the past year so has covered employment. Last week, covered employment totaled 3.7 million, down from 3.9 million a year ago.

The graph (right) shows the changes in unemployment insurance claims (as a share of covered employment) in North Carolina since the recession’s start in December 2007.

Both new and continuing claims appear to have peaked for this cycle, and the four-week averages of new and continuing claims have fallen considerably. Yet continuing claims remain at an elevated level, which suggests that unemployed individuals are finding it difficult to find new positions.

Government At Work

The first in a weekly series of web videos from Speak NC shows the human faces behind North Carolina’s budget numbers.