Angry Bear made it to 21st on the list in popularity and influence this time around (I counted). I don’t really know how they determine this in detail, but next time Mrs. Rdan asks why I spend a lot of time blogging, I’ll use it. From Onalytica Indexes: ALTERNATIVE ECONOMIC INDICATORS A small number of […]

Lifted from a note on energy from Reader rjs comes a link filled narrative on oil and production issues for oil.  He deals with one aspect of drilling for “energy independence”. From reader rjs: Saudi America? The release of this year’s edition of the World Energy Outlook from the IEA (International Energy Agency) received quite a bit […]

Update: More expansive discussion of this model with more graphics, here. Update 2: There is a revised and corrected version of the model and spreadsheet here, with discussion. It has long seemed to me that redistribution is, for some reason, necessary for the emergence, continuance, and growth of large, prosperous, modern, high-productivity monetary economies. No such economy […]

by Linda Beale The Media’s Role in Driving the “Fiscal Cliff” Imagery The mainstream media has been fed a steady diet of releases from interested parties (like right-leaning propaganda tanks) about the need to adopt austerity measures, often cast as needing to save the country from out-of-control spending and unprecedented deficits and debt. At the […]

Nate Silver is all the rage, but when Dean Baker tweeted “Excellent #WAPO article”  I had to read it.  To me the hero of the article is a meta analyst who used data collected by others to discover that Avandia causes increased risk of heart attacks.  Meta analysis, and the name is Nissen. To see whether his […]

Yves Smith at continues to point us in the direction of property ownership and the fallout from the widespread disregard of law in establishing title to property in her post Systematic document forgery and fabrication at Naked Capitalism: The Department of Justice and the state of Missouri have each announced criminal plea bargains with one […]

1/24/12  Links worth noting by Linda Beale: Germany rejects Swiss banking secrecy deal;   Labor Devaluation  David Jolly, German Lawmakers Reject Swiss Tax Deal, New York Times (Nov. 23, 2012).The US and other countries like Germany have been pressing the Swiss on their bank secrecy, which allows U.S. and other foreign citizens to establish bank accounts without […]

I’ve been reading Steven Johnson’s The Ghost Map, about the London cholera epidemic of 1854, and one passage reminded me exactly of today’s economics discipline. The sense of similarity was heightened because I also (instigated by Nick Rowe) happened to be reading Mankiw’s micro textbook section on the rising marginal cost of production — a […]

Congratulations Bill. Joe Weisenthal at Business Insider offers some hyperbole in The Genius Who Invented Economics Blogging Reveals How He Got Everything Right And What’s Coming Next, but also offers well deserved praise for Bill McBride and Calculated Risk.  Paul Krugman in the NYT posts  All Hail Calculated Risk and praises Bill’s work as well. Bill […]