Waiting for relief checks during the Great Depression. Calipatria, California, March 1937. Source: United States Library of Congress, digital ID fsa.8b31768.
Famously, James Carvill hung a sign outside Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign headquarters that read:
- Change vs. more of the same
- The economy, stupid
- Don’t forget health care
Although the sign was intended for campaign workers, a variant of #2 became the de facto slogan for the campaign.
It’s the primary election season here again in the USA and once more the candidates are taking about the economy, even though most of them are lawyers with little background in what economists proudly call their dismal science. (Proudly because Thomas Carlyle — who coined the pejorative against them in 1849 — was arguing for slavery and against the economists’ call for freedom of the labor market.)
ModelSheet doesn’t have any political affiliation but we do know a bit about business and the economy. We offer two economic model spreadsheets that you can use to inject some rationality to the heated rhetoric around jobs, investment, tax, and the economic cycle.
The first offers a dynamic macro-economic model of a national economy with production, consumption, capital investment, labor market with unemployment, price level, money supply, inventory cycles, and shocks.
The second offers dynamic Monte Carlo simulation of an economy with shocks and multiple trials. This economic model has production, consumption, capital investment, labor market with unemployment, price level, money supply, and inventory cycles.
We hope these will give you a little insight into the various candidates’ proposals.
