Krugman started it, in response to Lucas. Everyone piles on. Plutocracy Files has the list of links. (Plus don’t miss Nick Rowe’s, which includes a long comment thread.) Here’s what wows me: all these world-classical economists are accusing each other of contradicting “textbook economics,” and circling through extraordinary contortions in their efforts to reconcile that school […]

Uwe Reinhardt at Economix sums up health care policy proposals over the last decades(hat tip save the rustbelt) To describe the unifying theme running through these past variants, it is helpful to enumerate the major economic functions any health system must perform: Producing health-care goods and services. Financing health care, which involves extracting money from […]

Bloomberg notes: Fed’s Once-Secret Data Released to Public By editor Bloomberg News today released spreadsheets showing daily borrowing totals for 407 banks and companies that tapped Federal Reserve emergency programs during the 2007 to 2009 financial crisis. It’s the first time such data have been publicly available in this form.To download a zip file of […]

Via National memo comes a review of a book on the ‘Tea Party’. One might imagine the changes that worry Tea Partiers to be primarily economic. But Tea Party members rarely emphasize economic concerns. The nightmare of societal decline is usually painted in cultural hues, and the villains in the picture are freeloading social groups, […]

What’s a person to do? or ‘Motivated avoidance’  From the American Psychological Association comes two studies here and here. Individuals are often confronted with information that they do not know how to comprehend or evaluate, even though this information can be of critical importance to the self (or society as a whole). In the case […]

by Tom aka Rusty Rustbelt Health Care Thoughts: Regulatory Bumbling The people who daily manage health care services (and their advisers) have been shocked at the inability of the Obama administration to manage the administrative regs roll out process. The 2009 stimulus act contained multi-year funding for adopting electronic medical records (EMR/EHR) systems. The funding […]

by reader ilsm The Campaign to Preserve Pentagon Waste is in High Gear: From Forbes, Defense Advocate Loren Thompson:  How To Waste $100 Billion: Weapons That Didn’t Work Out One of the most unsettling facets of federal finance is the way the government devalues past investments. The political system is so focused on the next […]

by Linda Beale   Ian Ayres on the Brandeis Tax I’ve often argued here that vast inequality is harmful to democracy, and that the kind of unequal society that we have today, reflected the Gilded Age of yore, is especially worrisome.  Much of what is happening in this country that threatens freedom and economic suffering […]

Update: Mike Konczal also takes a  look at this question in Who are the one percent and what do they do for a living.Update 2: Another source for historical trends on inequality is at The Center for Budget and Policy Priorities by Taryn Hart     Taryn Hart publishes at her blog Plutocracy files and has interviewed […]