Brad DeLong made a pithy observation about work force retention and productivity during the recession. While employers have cut their staff numbers, productivity has in fact gone up. "It is really beginning to look as though businesses take recessions as opportunities to greatly slim down their workforces without making the workers they retain too angry and depressed," DeLong wrote. I'm not sure if this is due to strong morale in the face of challenge—or blind fear at the prospect of being laid off—but I'd agree with DeLong that this "is good news" as far as recovery is concerned.

Paul Krugman beats his Keynesian drum, repeating his call for a second stimulus. Rising unemployment means lower wages, he reasons, which could lead to spiraling deflation. We need more (and faster) government spending to mitigate burgeoning joblessness, he suggests. So pretty-please don't believe what the WSJ's conservative economists have to say on the subject, he exhorts.

Barry Ritholtz entertained us with a soliloquy on the crappiness of Wall Street economists*. His gripes? They missed signs of almost every crisis in the last year; they are institutionally biased; their data and evidence stink; they refused to acknowledge the crisis, even after it was in full swing; etc. Of course, we don't need to be convinced that there's a lot of lackluster personal finance advice floating around these days ...

Felix Salmon joins the chorus of high-profile commentators that know the underlying structure of the U.S. economy is shifting dramatically but aren't sure exactly how. He picks up Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich's argument that we can't really "recover" because the economy wasn't really healthy before the recession hit: wages were flatlining and consumer debt was rising, among other symptoms. Salmon ties that into a thesis he credits to Mohamad El-Erian, CEO of mondo-sized bond firm PIMCO. We're headed from this economy, to "something else," paraphrases Salmon. (In this context, also check out Daniel Gross' column from today on the stimulus.)

*Correction (July 13, 2009): This piece originally stated that Barry Ritholtz took issue with Wall Street reporters. Ritholtz's entry, in fact, refers to Wall Street economists.