I yield to no one in my admiration for the careful, thoughtful, and reality-based economics practiced by Fed Chair Janet Yellen. So I was taken aback a bit by a section in her Jackson Hole speech on Friday.
I don’t plan to publish this wage mash-up every quarter, but given the building and misguided pressure on the Fed to start raising rates to prevent allegedly incipient wage and price inflation, I thought I’d update the previous quarter’s result through the first half of this year.
One unhappy lesson we’ve learned in recent years is that economics is a far more political subject than we liked to imagine. Well, duh, you may say. But, before the financial crisis, many economists — even, to some extent, yours truly — believed that there was a fairly broad professional consensus on some important issues.
Shahien Nasiripour
