A study from the Berkeley Terner Center on roughly 800 prefabricated housing units suggests that offsite construction could lend more housing at cheaper prices if it could be brought to scale: The Case for Off-site Multifamily Construction While a number of other countries such as Sweden have already broadly integrated off-site construction, only a few […]
Monthly Archives: October 2017
Tax Cuts and Labor Supply Elasticity
Dietrich E. Vollrath on why tax cuts don’t lead to growth: We think that if you lower the tax rate, and hence raise the returns to inputs, we should get more of them. But to “supercharge” growth in GDP, or to have any appreciable effect on GDP at all, you need that the elasticity of […]
Federal Deficits and Government Spending
Stephanie Kelton with an NYT editorial on why the deficit doesn’t matter, but the economy does: The trick is to adjust the budget to make efficient use of the people, factories and raw materials we have…. But all of this goes unrecognized on Capitol Hill, where the very words “debt” and “deficit” have been weaponized […]
Partisan Gerrymandering Case before the Supreme Court
NPR: “Partisan Gerrymandering– How Much is Too Much?“ With the court apparently split 4-4 along liberal-conservative lines, the man in the middle is Justice Anthony Kennedy, who in a 2004 court opinion left the door open to declaring extreme partisan gerrymandering unconstitutional if “manageable standards” could be developed for identifying which ones are extreme. Justice […]