Yesterday in the New York Times Greg Mankiw — a professor of economics at Harvard, an advisor to the governor of Massachusetts, in the campaign for the Republican presidential nomination and a former Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under president Bush — had a column in which he argued that a cut in […]

by Mike Kimel Can someone explain to me why people volunteer at for-profit hospitals? I can understand volunteering at a not-for-profit hospital, but how is volunteering at a for-profit hospital different from, say, volunteering at Exxon-Mobil or Wal-Mart?

NYTBR, 11 September 2011 Ten years ago today, nineteen people, including fifteen Saudis–using funding from the House of Saud and led by a distinguished member of that House–used airplanes to attack the U.S., destroying the World Trade Towers, damaging the Pentagon, and being prevented from attacking the White House only by the heroic efforts of […]

by rdan Angry Bear and I have reached an understanding regarding the blog and decision making. He has been referred to as owning the blog, as much as it can be with such a rowdy group, and has agreed to transfer this ownership to me, sort of the Bill Gates giving over to Steve Ballmer […]

One of the current Republican talking point is that a major reason that firms are not hiring is regulatory uncertainty. Of course there is little or no evidence to support this argument and virtually every poll of business and especially small business shows that fear of regulation is a very minor factor in current business […]

Lifted from comments from Spencer’s post on Productivity and the stock market Dan Becker: Mike Panzer at Financial Armageddon has been on the issue that the “street” is missing all that is going on around them. From his blog: http://panzner.typepad.com/ However, I wonder if a new paper, From Keeping Up with the Joneses to Keeping […]

I still think Obama is toast—a result of his own making, since he’s really the apotheosis of a government-hating Republican who never tries to do anything because he’s afraid it would succeed.  He’s basically Jon Huntsman, economic policy and all, with a slightly better social policy—or at least a willingness not to try to compete […]

Simon Johnson comments on Standard and Poor’s irrational ratings: Standard & Poor’s downgrade of United States government debt last month has been much debated, but not enough attention has been devoted to the fact, reported last week by Bloomberg News, that it continues to rate securities based on subprime mortgages as AAA. In short, S.&P. […]

With all of the problems I have been having with my internet connection I may have missed it, but the revisions to second quarter productivity did not seem to have been covered very well. But nonfarm productivity growth is slowing sharply. It was actually negative in the first and second quarter —0.6% and -0.7% in […]