Airline Deregulation Act
The 1978 U.S. law that phased out the Civil Aeronautics Board’s control of routes and fares—an emblem of late-twentieth-century deregulation.
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Glossary
Concise entries for ideas that show up in public debates about trade, growth, and policy—especially those highlighted in readings like “The Economist’s Hour.” Use these pages to orient yourself before exploring state-level data in the dashboard. Topic pages offer longer reads that link back to these terms.
Glossary entries starting with the letter A
Alan Greenspan
Long-serving chair of the Federal Reserve (1987–2006) whose tenure bridged the Great Moderation, the dot-com cycle, and the run-up to the financial crisis.
Antitrust
Law and policy aimed at curbing excessive market power—mergers, collusion, and monopolistic conduct—often justified by consumer welfare or competitive process goals.
Arthur Burns
Economist and Federal Reserve chair (1970–1978) whose tenure overlapped the collapse of Bretton Woods and rising Great Inflation—often cited in debates over political pressure, mistaken accommodation, and credibility.
Arthur Laffer
Economist popularly tied to the “Laffer curve” depiction of tax-rate revenue trade-offs—an emblem of supply-side arguments that lower marginal rates could unleash growth and receipts.
Asset bubble
A sustained run-up in prices—often for housing, equities, or crypto—fueled by credit, optimism, or herding rather than fundamentals alone.
Glossary entries starting with the letter B
Banking regulation
Rules on capital, liquidity, consumer protection, and permissible activities intended to keep credit systems stable and trustworthy.
Bretton Woods system
The 1944–1971 (roughly) international monetary order: adjustable currency pegs centered on the U.S. dollar, constrained cross-border capital, and IMF oversight meant to reconcile growth with balance-of-payments discipline.
Glossary entries starting with the letter C
Capital flows
Cross-border movement of money for investment, lending, or portfolio allocation—tied to exchange rates and financial stability.
Carmen Reinhart
Harvard macroeconomist known for empirical work on sovereign debt, serial default, and crisis analogies across emerging and advanced economies—often cited with Kenneth Rogoff.
Clean Air Act
Major U.S. federal law (1970 and amendments) empowering the EPA to set air-quality standards and regulate pollution sources—central to environmental economics and cost-benefit debates.
Cold War economic effects
How geopolitical rivalry with the Soviet bloc reshaped U.S. trade, defense spending, innovation policy, and domestic politics from the late 1940s through 1991.
Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC)
U.S. agency regulating futures, options on commodities, and swaps tied to physical markets—overlapping with SEC and banking regulators after derivatives reform.
Competition
Rivalry among sellers (and sometimes buyers) that limits prices and encourages quality and innovation.
Competitive markets
Market settings with enough sellers and buyers that no participant sets the price alone—an institutional outcome policy often tries to protect or restore.
Consumer safety
Regulation, liability law, and standards meant to reduce injury from products, food, drugs, and services—classic non-price rationales for government rules.
Corporate concentration
The dominance of economic activity by a small number of very large firms—often discussed alongside, but not identical to, statistical market concentration.
Cost-benefit analysis
A structured way to compare the gains and losses of a policy or project, often using monetized impacts and explicit discounting of future effects.
Credit derivatives
Financial contracts whose payouts depend on borrowers’ default or credit quality—tools for hedging risk that also concentrated and obscured exposure before 2008.
Glossary entries starting with the letter D
Dani Rodrik
Harvard political economist famous for the globalization trilemma—democratic sovereignty, national policy autonomy, and financial integration cannot all be maximized simultaneously—and for nuanced views on industrial policy.
David Ricardo
Classical political economist (1772–1823) whose theory of comparative advantage still anchors introductory arguments for mutual gains from trade—even when countries differ in absolute productivity.
Deficit spending
When a government spends more than it collects in revenue over a period, borrowing to cover the shortfall.
Deflation
A sustained fall in the general price level—raising real debt burdens and sometimes depressing spending if people expect further declines.
Deregulation
Rolling back rules on prices, entry, or standards—often to encourage competition but sometimes with contested social costs.
Glossary entries starting with the letter E
Economic growth
A rise over time in an economy’s capacity to produce goods and services—often measured by real GDP or income per person.
Employment
The number of people with paid jobs (or self-employment)—the numerator behind job growth and a counterpart to unemployment and participation.
Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)
U.S. regulator implementing laws such as the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act—core site for quantitative benefit-cost analysis of pollution controls.
Environmental regulation
Rules limiting pollution, mandating disclosure, or protecting ecosystems—often justified by externalities markets do not price on their own.
Exchange rates
The price of one currency in terms of another—determining how affordable imports and exports are on world markets.
Glossary entries starting with the letter F
Federal Reserve
The U.S. central bank: the Federal Open Market Committee sets monetary policy; supervisors regulate many banks; staff provide payments, liquidity backstops, and financial-stability tools in stress.
Federal Trade Commission (FTC)
Independent U.S. agency with a twin mission: stop unfair methods of competition (often with the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division) and curb deceptive or unfair commercial practices affecting consumers.
Financial crisis
A disruption where credit contracts, institutions fail or merge under stress, and asset prices fall sharply—often transmitting to jobs, state revenues, and trade.
Financial regulation
The combined statutes and agency rules governing banks, broker-dealers, derivatives, disclosures, and resolution—aiming at investor protection and systemic stability.
Fiscal policy
Government choices on taxes, spending, and borrowing meant to influence employment, distribution, and long-run capacity.
Friedrich Hayek
Austrian-British economist and philosopher (1899–1992) honored for trade-cycle theory, the “knowledge problem” critique of central planning, and a constitutional vision of limited, rule-bound state power.
Glossary entries starting with the letter G
George Stigler
Chicago economist (1911–1991) who helped pioneer the economics of information, industrial organization empirics, and the theory of regulatory capture.
Globalization
The growing integration of product, labor, and capital markets across borders—often associated with trade openness, supply chains, and cultural exchange.
Gold standard
A monetary arrangement tying currency value to gold, historically anchoring exchange rates and limiting discretionary money creation.
Great Depression
The 1930s world depression: synchronized output collapse, catastrophic joblessness, banking panics, and deflation—reordering ideas about money, finance, and the state’s role in aggregate demand.
Great Moderation
Name for the mid-1980s–2007 stretch of lower inflation and output volatility in the United States—later reassessed after the financial crisis.
Great Recession
The 2007–2009 Great Financial Crisis and deep recession: U.S. housing finance, runnable shadow banking, and global dollar funding strains produced the worst postwar contraction until COVID-19—and a decade of contested policy legacies.
Glossary entries starting with the letter H
Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment Act
1978 U.S. law (amending earlier mandates) that formalized reporting on full employment and, after amendments, helped define the Federal Reserve’s dual mandate alongside price stability.
Glossary entries starting with the letter I
Industrial policy
Government efforts to favor specific sectors or technologies—subsidies, tariffs, public R&D, or national-security production goals.
Inflation
A sustained increase in the general level of prices for goods and services, usually expressed as an annual percentage change in a price index.
International Monetary Fund (IMF)
Cooperative of member countries, headquartered in Washington, that lends foreign exchange during balance-of-payments crises, runs macro surveillance, and supports technical assistance—born at Bretton Woods, remade by floating rates and capital mobility.
Glossary entries starting with the letter J
Janet Yellen
Macroeconomist and policymaker who chaired the Federal Reserve (2014–2018) and later served as U.S. Treasury secretary—associated with gradual normalization and labor-market attentiveness.
John Maynard Keynes
British economist (1883–1946) whose *General Theory* revolutionized macroeconomics around aggregate demand, uncertainty, and a role for public policy in deep slumps.
Joseph Stiglitz
Columbia Nobel laureate whose work on asymmetric information, screening, and equilibrium unemployment underpins modern market-failure economics—and whose public voice challenges laissez-faire finance and austerity conditionality.
Glossary entries starting with the letter K
Kenneth Rogoff
Macroeconomist and chess grandmaster known for crisis empirics, international macro, and the “curse of cash” argument for less large-denomination currency—often cited with Carmen Reinhart.
Keynesian economics
A school of thought emphasizing aggregate demand, counter-cyclical policy, and the idea that economies can stall without deliberate intervention.
Glossary entries starting with the letter L
Labor force participation
The share of the working-age population that is employed or actively looking for work.
Labor unions
Organizations of workers that bargain collectively over pay, benefits, and working conditions—shaping wage distributions and sometimes productivity.
Lawrence Summers
Harvard economist and former Treasury secretary, NEC director, and World Bank chief economist—prominent in 1990s–2000s debates on finance, deficits, and globalization.
Glossary entries starting with the letter M
Market concentration
How much production or revenue is controlled by a few firms—typically measured with concentration ratios or the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index in antitrust work.
Market efficiency
The hypothesis that prices in competitive markets rapidly reflect available information—strongest in financial markets, contested everywhere else.
Market revolution
A shorthand historians use for the expansion of capitalist markets—transport, credit, and commodification—often tied to nineteenth-century U.S. integration.
Milton Friedman
Monetarist and advocate of limited government who helped reshape how policymakers think about markets, money, and individual choice.
Monetarism
A school emphasizing stable money growth and skepticism that fiscal fine-tuning can manage the business cycle without igniting inflation.
Monetary policy
Central-bank choices—chiefly interest rates and balance-sheet operations—that influence borrowing costs, credit conditions, and inflation expectations.
Monopoly
A market structure with a single dominant seller (or close to it), facing limited direct competition.
Glossary entries starting with the letter O
Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA)
U.S. Labor Department agency setting and enforcing workplace safety and health standards—exemplifying rule-based risk reduction.
Read entry: Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA)
OECD
Paris-based forum of mostly high-income countries producing statistics, economic surveys, and soft-law policy coordination.
OPEC oil shocks
1970s episodes when oil exporters curtailed supply or raised prices sharply—propagating stagflation and recalibrating monetary policy worldwide.
Glossary entries starting with the letter P
Paul Samuelson
MIT economist (1915–2009) who mathematized micro and macro, authored a defining textbook, and linked welfare economics to public finance.
Paul Volcker
Federal Reserve chair (1979–1987) who prioritized breaking Great Inflation expectations with tight money—accepting recession as the price of credibility.
Price controls
Legal ceilings or floors on prices—rent caps, gasoline ceilings, wartime rationing—intended to shield consumers but often creating shortages or black markets.
Productivity
Output per unit of input—typically how much GDP or value added an economy or worker produces relative to hours worked.
Glossary entries starting with the letter R
Rational expectations
The idea that forward-looking agents use available information when forming beliefs, limiting systematic policy surprises.
Richard Posner
Judge and polymath who helped import price-theoretic reasoning into American law—antitrust, accidents, privacy—while later revisiting market fundamentalism after the financial crisis.
Robert Bork
Judge and legal scholar (1927–2012) whose writings—and failed Supreme Court nomination—helped embed consumer-welfare framing in U.S. antitrust interpretation.
Robert Mundell
Canadian Nobel laureate (1932–2020) associated with optimal currency areas, open-economy monetarist ideas, and intellectual roots of supply-side tax debates.
Robert Reich
Public intellectual, Berkeley professor, and former U.S. Labor secretary—prominent critic of union decline, corporate power, and wage stagnation in the globalization era.
Robert Solow
MIT Nobel laureate (1924–2023) whose growth models decomposed output rises into capital, labor, and a residual “technical progress”—shaping how economists talk about productivity.
Glossary entries starting with the letter S
Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC)
U.S. regulator of public securities markets—disclosure, enforcement against fraud, and oversight of exchanges and key market participants.
Sherman Antitrust Act
1890 U.S. statute declaring restraint of trade and monopolization unlawful—statutory foundation for modern American antitrust.
Stagflation
A painful mix of stagnant growth or high unemployment with high inflation—challenging simple Keynesian and Phillips-curve intuitions.
Subsidies
Government payments, tax breaks, or cheap credit that lower producers’ costs or boost purchasers’ demand—common in agriculture, energy, and technology.
Supply-side economics
Policy perspective stressing tax cuts, incentives, and supply constraints (labor, capital, regulation) rather than demand management alone.
Systemic risk
The threat that distress in one institution or market propagates broadly—through correlated portfolios, funding markets, or payment systems.
Glossary entries starting with the letter T
Tariffs
Taxes on imported (sometimes exported) goods—raising domestic prices, shielding producers, and shaping trade balances.
Trade deficit
When imports exceed exports—financed by borrowing from abroad or selling assets to foreign investors.
Trade surplus
When a country’s exports of goods and services exceed imports over a period—also called a favorable balance of trade in older language.
Trickle-down economics
Popular label for claims that benefits to high earners or investors eventually reach workers—often criticized as oversimplified or unsupported.
Glossary entries starting with the letter U
Unemployment
The share of the labor force that is jobless and actively seeking work—an indicator of spare capacity and hardship in labor markets.
Glossary entries starting with the letter W
Wages
Compensation for labor—central to household welfare, inflation dynamics, and debates over inequality.
World Bank
World Bank Group anchor institutions—chiefly IBRD creditworthy sovereign lending and IDA concessional finance for the poorest countries—plus investment-guarantee and dispute-settlement arms supporting development projects and policy programs.