Relevant and even prescient commentary on news, politics and the economy.

The Brute Economics of Slavery

Preramble: I posted this on my blog exactly a year ago today, in slightly different form.  Dan linked to it once, from here, just a few weeks before I started writing for Angry Bear.  Recent comments got me thinking about it again.   In thinking about the economics of slavery, I’m considering slavery and serfdom to […]

World Trade

Mark J. Perry reports on the latest world trade data from The CPB Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis.  He presents a graph from 2000 on showing that the levels of world trade and world industrial output have both reached new post-recovery highs. He takes this to be very good news, and draws some broad […]

Has America Lost It’s Drive? – Pt. 4

In Part 3 of this series, I wondered a couple of things.  – With the vehicle/1000 people number in the range of 825 to 845 since 2004, is the market near saturation?– Is the January sales number of 14.2 SAAR (seasonally adjusted at annual rate) enough to maintain the vehicle/1000 people number? For the first […]

Insurance and Birth Control

In this Forbes article, Tim Worstall says he agrees with generally available birth control, but questions why health insurance should pay for it.    Specifically he says:  “But I really cannot see the point of trying to have health care insurance which then covers a multitude of treatments that aren’t really insurable matters, contraception being just […]

More on Michigan Voting

The U.S. Election Atlas shows the Michigan county by county results for the general election in 2008.  Note that they have inexplicably reversed the normal Red-Blue color coding.   Contrast those results with the 2012 Republican primary results. In the Lower Peninsula, the counties that went for Romney in a big way generally went for Obama […]

Is America Losing Its Drive? – Pt. 3 Vehicles per 1000 Persons

In private communication, Roger Chittum got me thinking about the vehicle component of gasoline consumption. I’m going focus on the gross vehicle numbers, and not get too deeply into the car/truck/SUV product mix detail.   Data is from the Department of Energy TRANSPORTATION ENERGY DATA BOOK: EDITION 30—2011.   (Warning:  414 page pdf.) According to Table 3-5 […]

Has America Lost its Drive? Part 2

I made a mistake in my original post.   Graph 4 in that post was based on the wrong data set.  As Roger Chittum pointed out in comments, that graph only covers a subset of total gasoline deliveries. This is the correct graph.  (Source.)  Thanks, Roger! Graph 1 Gasoline Supplied The fall off in gasoline delivery […]

Has America Lost its Drive?

Yesterday,  Karl Smith posted on Oil and the Structural Recession.  This seems to be one of Karl’s thinking-out-loud posts, with more questions than answers, some convoluted reasoning, and a conclusion that higher gasoline prices are in our future.  If I read him right, this will be due to a demand pull. He included this graph […]