The NYT has difficulty finding pundits who can write knowledgeably about economics. Thomas Friedman made this point in his Sunday column. At one point he quotes Gary Green, the president of Forsyth Technical Community College, in Winston-Salem, N.C.:

"'We have a labor surplus in this country and a labor shortage at the same time,' Green explained to me. Workers in North Carolina, particularly in textiles and furniture, who lost jobs either to outsourcing or the recession in 2008, often 'do not have the skills required to get a new job today' in the biotech, health care and manufacturing centers that are opening in the state.

"If before, he added, 'you just needed a high school shop class or a short postsecondary certificate to work in a factory, now you need an associate degree in machining,' a two-year program that requires higher math, I.T. and systems skills. In addition, some employers are now demanding that you not only have an associate degree but that nationally recognized skill certifications be incorporated into the curriculum to show that you have mastered the skills they want, like computer-integrated machining."

Actually there are simple ways to identify labor shortages. First and foremost we should be seeing rapidly rising wages. If employers cannot get the workers they need then they raise the wages they offer to pull workers away from other employers. This is how markets work. (We should also see longer workweeks and increased vacancies.)

In fact there is no major sector of the economy where wages are rising rapidly. This shows rather conclusively that workers do not have skill shortages although it may be the case that many managers are so ignorant of markets that they don't know that the way to attract better workers is to raise wages. Of course that would suggest the need to better train managers, not workers.

The NYT had a useful piece on the increase in the number of people working at part-time jobs who would like full-time employment. This is an important measure of under-employment in the downturn that is missed when people just look at the unemployment rate. Since part-time workers often lack benefits like health care insurance, this can be an especially important issue.

However the piece concludes by equating part-time work with flexibility for employers. This is not true. There is no direct relationship between part-time work and flexible hours. A worker who has a regular shift from 1:00-5:00, Monday to Friday, provides no more flexibility to an employer than a worker who works from 9:00-5:00 the same days.

The flexibility comes from the fact that part-time workers are likely to have less bargaining power than full-time workers and therefore may have to accept changes in work hours on short notice. But this is a different issue than being employed part-time.

There are some things that we can learn from economics, just as there are things we learn from astronomy. The vast majority of people in the United States believe that the earth goes around the sun because of what astronomers tell us. After all, we all see the opposite every day in the sky.

For this reason, when a major newspaper tells us that when it comes to economics it is all just so confusing (except for what they insist you believe), it is doing a serious disservice. While some aspects of economics are difficult, many of the fundamentals, such as why we have a prolonged economic slump and millions of people are unemployed, are not. (Lack of demand in the economy, if you have to ask.)

In this vein, the Post article, "It's an old numbers game. What if they're wrong?" seems almost like a deliberate effort to confuse readers into thinking there is nothing that can be done about the economy except to have the government reduce deficits.

The second paragraph tells people:

"How much debt can the nation manage? The United States was at about 102 percent in 2012, with the amount of debt held by the public closer to 75 percent. To some, that signals danger. Others say we could handle even more. In certain wonky circles, the debate over what ratio is sustainable is almost endless. And yet, serious people assess the president’s budget, indeed any budget, by how it decreases this ratio in years to come."

This is almost completely wrong. For example, many economists would not even look to the ratio of debt to GDP as being an important variable since debt can be quickly reduced by selling assets. If a high debt level is some horrible burden on the economy, then the United States could just sell several trillions of dollars of assets and immediately lower its burden. People who understand balance sheets know this.

Also, the price of debt fluctuates with interest rates. Debt issued at low interest rates can be repurchased at steep discounts when interest rates rise. This means that if debt-to-GDP ratios are what matters, we will have a great opportunity to quickly reduce this ratio when interest rates rise later in the decade as is widely predicted. This is a reason that serious people tend to focus on the interest burden, which is near a post-World War II low.

The Post had a lengthy piece about seniors being ripped off on their savings by scam artists promising high returns. While this is a serious problem, the article implies that the low interest rate policy by the Fed is a major factor pushing seniors in this direction.

Actually, very few seniors have large amounts of money in short-term accounts that would be hurt by the Fed's low interest rate policy. According to Federal Reserve Board's latest Survey of Consumer Finance, around 15 percent of seniors have $25,000 or more in short-term money. Most of these people are likely to also have money in stock, which has provided very good returns in the last three years. They may also hold longer term bonds, the price of which has risen sharply as interest rates fell.

Even if a senior just held their $25,000 in short-term money, the hit from the low interest rate policy would still be limited. If we consider a 3.0 percent interest rate to be normal and assume that they are now getting a near zero interest rate, the loss to a senior with $25,000 would be around $750 a year. This is approximately the same hit that a senior with a $20,000 annual Social Security benefit (roughly 30 percent above the average) would see after 13 years under President Obama's proposal to change the base of the cost of living adjustment to the chained CPI.  

Addendum:

I see from comments that folks really want to believe that this low interest rate policy is a horrible disaster because every senior you know has huge amounts of money in CDs. That's nice, but I prefer arithmetic. My hypothetical case refers to someone with $25k in short-term money; a group that comprises around 15 percent of all seniors. I know that people want to say that seniors don't hold any stocks or bonds, but the Fed's data disagrees and there will be enormous overlap between the people who have substantial stock and bond wealth and those with $25k in short-term money. (Sorry, I don't have time to analyze the micro data just now.)

This means that the number of people who are hit by the low interest rates and not seeing some offsetting benefit from higher stock or bond prices will be considerably less than 15 percent of seniors, let's say between 5-10 percent of seniors. This group will be seeing a hit that is comparable to the hit from the chained CPI. Note, I did not say this was a small hit. My point is that it affects a relatively small share of seniors. The chained CPI will hit virtually all seniors, the vast majority of whom do not have $25,000 in financial assets of any type.

The NYT had a piece on the precipitous fall in the price of Apple's stock since last September. It explained the decline in part by the fact that an unusually large portion of its stockholders are individual investors. These investors were overly enthusiastic about the stock last year and now, according to the piece, excessively pessimistic. It tells readers;

"At its current price, investors are betting that Apple will grow more slowly than the average American company. And they are ignoring the enormous pile of cash that Apple has built up, which it could hand out to shareholders tomorrow if it wanted."

These two sentences actually are in direct contradiction. Apple has accumulated an extraordinary amount of cash precisely because it does not see good investment opportunities. That is good reason to believe that its profits will grow less rapidly in the future than other companies. Rather than ignoring this cash, investors are likely focused very much on the fact that Apple does not seem able to find good places to use its money.

There is one other point that is worth making about the stock price. It is plausible to tell a story in which Apple's stock price would be driven to extraordinary levels by ill-informed individual investors. (Although large investors could counter this run-up by shorting Apple stock.) It is less plausible that the price would be driven to irrationally low levels.

Institutional investors do own large amounts of Apple stock and in fact they have considerably less money in Apple today than they did eight months ago. If they viewed Apple stock as being seriously under-valued at its current price then they would rush in to take advantage of a bargain. The fact that this does not appear to be happening suggests that it is not just individual investors who view Apple's stock price as being too high. The big institutional investors must share this view.

Thomas Edsall relies on some research which unfortunately in many cases is a bit dated to discuss the idea that middle wage jobs in the United States are disappearing due to technology. While there was some evidence that middle wage occupations were dwindling in the 1990s, this was reversed in the last decade. In that decade there were declines in employment shares for all but the lowest paying occupations. Since we saw the same pattern of wage polarization, with more income going to the top, in the 2000s and 1990s, this would seem to indicate that the loss of middle wage jobs was not the story in the 1990s either.

In considering the recent pattern of job growth the proliferation of low-paying jobs is most obviously explained by the weak economy. The economy also generates lots of bad jobs, however in a healthy labor market most people don't take them. It is only when people have no other job options that take these low-paying jobs. Therefore the fact that a disproportionate share of the jobs created in the last 5 years are low-paying jobs is best explained by the fact that the economy is not creating very many jobs.

The piece also notes the shift of manufacturing jobs to China. This is not a result of inevitable globalization, but rather a policy decision to put manufacturing workers in direct competition with low-paid workers in the developing world, while maintaining or increasing protectionist barriers that allow doctors, lawyers, and other highly paid professsionals from avoid similar competition. The United States has also further disadvantaged manufacturing workers by pursuing a high dollar policy that makes it more difficult for them to compete internationally.

There is little reason to believe that there is anything inevitable about the loss of wages by middle class workers. Rather this is primarily a policy driven outcome.

Former students and admirers of Harvard professor Martin Feldstein, who was also the chief economist in the Reagan administration, were undoubtedly outraged to see him excluded from the NYT's Economix blog list of top blunderers in economics. Professor Feldstein's claim to fame in this category stems in large part  from a 1974 article which purports to show that Social Security led to a reduction in private savings.

This article received considerable attention and played an important role in advancing Feldstein's reputation as one of the top economists of his generation. However, it turned out that the result was attributable to a programming error. This error was eventually uncovered by Dean Leimer and Selig Lesnoy, two researchers at the Social Security Administration. When the error was corrected, the relationship between Social Security wealth and private saving turned out to be statistically insignificant.

Feldstein actually revisited the topic again in the 1990s and claimed that with two decades of additional data he was able to establish that he had been right all along. This one turned out not to be quite right either. My colleague David Rosnick and I tried to replicate his results without success. After repeated efforts to contact Professor Feldstein to better ascertain his methodology, he eventually gave us enough information to determine that we were running our regressions correctly.

Feldstein also added that it did not surprise him that we could not replicate his results, since saving data are subject to large revisions. This is true, but then it leads one to wonder why anyone would make major policy pronouncements based on results using the pre-revision data.

Addendum:

I am also reminded of this $12 trillion mistake back in 2003 by Michael Boskin, who had been the chief economist in the administration of the first President Bush. He was briefly convinced that money being withdrawn from tax sheltered accounts like 401(k)s would lead to huge budget surpluses. (Thanks to Charles McMillion for this one.)

There was also the time in 2007 when Boston University Professor Larry Kotlikoff, one of the country's leading deficit scolds, was concerned that people were saving too much for retirement.

Carmen Reinhart and Ken Rogoff (R&R) responded to the paper I noted earlier by Thomas Herndon, Michael Ash, and Robert Pollin (HAP), which showed that their famous result associating high debt levels with slow growth was driven by spreadsheet errors. The gist of the response is that HAP also find that high debt is associated with slower growth, and that other studies (including one of theirs) found the same result anyhow.

The first point is highly misleading. It is true that in most of their specifications HAP found growth was slower in periods with debt levels above 90 percent of GDP than below, but the gap was relatively small and nowhere close to statistically significant. Furthermore, they found a much bigger gap in growth rates around debt-to-GDP ratios of 30 percent. If we think that R&Rs methodology is telling us something important about the world then the take-away should be that we want to keep debt-to-GDP ratios below 30 percent.

If R&R had produced the correct table in their initial paper no one would have taken seriously their claim that the 90 percent debt-to-GDP ratio presents some sort of cliff. The corrected table in no way supports that view.

That's the question millions will be asking when they see the new paper by my friends at the University of Massachusetts, Thomas Herndon, Michael Ash, and Robert Pollin. Herndon, Ash, and Pollin (HAP) corrected the spreadsheets of Carmen Reinhart and Ken Rogoff. They show the correct numbers tell a very different story about the relationship between debt and GDP growth than the one that Reinhart and Rogoff have been hawking.

Just to remind folks, Reinhart and Rogoff (R&R) are the authors of the widely acclaimed book on the history of financial crises, This Time is Different. They have also done several papers derived from this research, the main conclusion of which is that high ratios of debt to GDP lead to a long periods of slow growth. Their story line is that 90 percent is a cutoff line, with countries with debt-to-GDP ratios above this level seeing markedly slower growth than countries that have debt-to-GDP ratios below this level. The moral is to make sure the debt-to-GDP ratio does not get above 90 percent.

There are all sorts of good reasons for questioning this logic. First, there is good reason for believing causation goes the other way. Countries are likely to have high debt-to-GDP ratios because they are having serious economic problems.

Second, as Josh Bivens and John Irons have pointed out, the story of the bad growth in high debt years in the United States is driven by the demobilization after World War II. In other words, these were not bad economic times, the years of high debt in the United States had slow growth because millions of women opted to leave the paid labor force.

Third, the whole notion of public debt turns out to be ill-defined. Countries can sell off assets to pay down debts, would this avoid the R&R high debt twilight zone of slow growth? In fact, even the value of debt itself is not constant.Long-term debt issued in times of low interest rates will fall in value when interest rates rise. If there is a high debt twilight zone effect as R&R claim, then we can just buy back bonds at steep discounts and send our debt-to-GDP ratio plummeting. 

But HAP tells us that we need not concern ourselves with any arguments this complicated. The basic R&R story was simply the result of them getting their own numbers wrong.

It would have been helpful to note this fact in an article discussing the Obama administration's proposal to cut Social Security benefits by adopting a chained consumer price index as the basis for Social Security cost of living adjustments (COLA). The piece notes claims that the chained CPI provides a more accurate measure of the rate of inflation, then tells readers:

"Some argue that the chained CPI would cheat seniors by understating inflation for the elderly, who spend more on health care. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has found conflicting evidence on that point."

Actually the Congressional Budget Office did not find conflicting evidence on this point, it just noted that the evidence is not conclusive. If the White House was interested in an accurate measure of the rate of inflation seen by seniors then it could instruct the Bureau of Labor Statistics to construct a full elderly CPI that would track the actual consumption patterns of the elderly. It has steadfastly refused to consider this proposal, which could lead to a higher annual COLA.

The Post should have made this point so that readers would recognize that the goal of the Obama administration is to cut Social Security, not make the COLA more accurate. Some people may be confused on this point.

The article also misled readers when it asserted:

"Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security account for nearly 40 percent of federal spending and are growing rapidly, as they must provide benefits to all who qualify, regardless of cost."

Actually the cost of Social Security is growing relatively slowly, having risen by roughly 1.0 percentage point of GDP over the last two decades. It is projected to rise another 1.0 percentage point over the next two decades, then stay roughly constant as a share of GDP over the rest of the century.

Medicare costs have been projected to rise more rapidly because of rapidly growing private sector health care costs. In fact, Medicare costs have risen quite slowly over the last 5 years, although CBO does not project this slower rate of growth to persist.