Tag Archives: macroeconomic

Theft at the Grandest Scale

November 13, 2013 By in Blog, Data Analysis, Economic Theory, Policy Tags: , , , , , , , , , , 5 Comments

Theft is a strong word. It requires two things, desire and a lack of consent. One party desires something from another and takes it without their consent. Simple. My current project is developing an understanding of macroeconomics based on a formal aggregation of microeconomics. I did not anticipate the understanding that I found. This last weekend I worked on understanding claims against wealth inequality. I began by looking at the distribution of income derived form the Average Wage Index (AWI) from 1990-2012. Plotted on a Log-Log scale the distribution appeared to follow a canonical distribution Figure 1.

Figure 1 distribution of wealth (# people/$ v. income) in United States (2012)

Figure 1 distribution of wealth (# people/$ v. income) in United States (2012)

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Natural Gas Price “Spike”

March 28, 2013 By in Blog, Data Analysis, Energy, Natural Gas Tags: , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

Recent news reports heralding higher natural gas prices at 19-month highs (Bloomberg) due to cold weather (Reuters) and diminished inventories (even reports of the shale boom ending CSM) piqued my interest. There is hope that natural gas futures are bright (Forth Worth Star Telegram).  I wanted to check these narratives against some of my models.

Estimating the marginal utility of money plagues my understanding of economics and greatly affects my ability to model it. However, I developed an alternative deflator called the Energy Price Index (EPI). I took historical Energy Information Agency (EIA) data and performed a regression of the data against the price of oil and natural gas for each fuel source, and then aggregated them based on fraction of total primary energy consumption to get the average price of primary energy delivered to the economy. I tied this model then to the daily WTI crude oil prices and the Henry Hub spot market. Here is an early attempt trying to describe this Economics for Engineers.  This model has several problems first it ignores technological change in the conversion of energy to useful work, it assumes that the distribution between energy and non energy feedstocks is fixed, and it uses an adiabatic model of the US economy. The last assumption only affects the estimation of wealth, I perform a more rigorous derivation of the price and money relationships in The Effect of Price in Macroeconomics and have not had time to rebuild my models based on this work.  The other two assumptions are a function of my own ignorance. Ayers and Warr estimate the necessary information to fix this error. Continue reading →

Pre-alpha Release 0.1a of “The Effect of Price in Macroeconomics”

March 15, 2013 By in Blog, Pre-alpha Tags: , , , , , , Leave a comment

Motivated by the debate over raising minimum wage and over the energy policy decisions of Germany and Japan with limiting nuclear energy, I wrote a paper using the thermodynamic analogy to show how price impacts the macro economy. I did not expect that it would take me this long to write as it introduced an unexpected need for developing some concepts such as the ideal arbitrage cycle.

Along the way, I found a different mathematical justification of the Black-Schoels equation that does not make the efficient markets assumption, but instead clarifies the concept of an efficient market as one that maximizes the system’s entropy. Such a MAXENT approach, has significant implications and can even be generalized to non-equilibrium conditions.

Here is the link to the release, The Effect of Price in Macroeconomics.

I look forward to your feedback.