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

Not A Great Week to be Rupert Murdoch

The week began with the New York Post reporting “a scoop,” and then putting a track coach and a high school kid on the front page as “suspects.” You would think it couldn’t get worse for NewsCorp.  I would think it couldn’t get worse for NewsCorp, especially after CNN went out of their way to […]

Note to Reinhart/Rogoff (et. al): The Cause Usually Precedes the Effect

Or: Thinking About Periods and Lags No need to rehash this cock-up, except to point to the utterly definitive takedown by Arindrajit Dube over at Next New Deal (hat tip: Krugman), and to point out that the takedown might just take even if you’re looking at R&R’s original, skewed data. But a larger point: I frequently see econometrics like R&R’s, comparing […]

Reinhart/Rogoff Shot Full of Holes Updated X3

This story has rapidly made the rounds in the blogosphere, and it is indeed a big deal. One of the most significant economics papers underlying the argument for why high government debt (especially over 90% of gross domestic product) is bad for growth was published in 2010 by Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, “Growth in […]

Just so y’all know …

Most of the formatting in my posts–blockquotes, paragraph spacing, italics–did not transfer to the new platform, so my old posts are pretty much a mishmash to read.  At least those posted since about early December, when I began drafting and posting using my then-new Chromebook, which uses only Google’s word processor, not MS Word.  I’m […]

Old and new feedburner subscriptions…are they working now for you?

MEV has written that this should be happening for our subscribers: Feedburner issue: You currently have 2 different feeds setup through feedburner. We created a redirect for the old feedburner URL to the new one and all RSS feeds should be working properly at this point. •All old subscribers will be redirected to the newer […]

Empirical Methods and Progress in Macroeconomics

Mark Thoma, among many others, discusses some implications for readers to consider for macro overall: Empirical Methods and Progress in Macroeconomics (Quote)The blow-up over the Reinhart-Rogoff results reminds me of a point I’ve been meaning to make about our ability to use empirical methods to make progress in macroeconomics. This isn’t about the computational mistakes that Reinhart […]

Migrated

Hi folks….let me know if there are problems with your feeds or old links. And also if you find our new format easier to read and what functions we might add once we settle down into our new functioning environment.

Marathon

I posted all I can say publicly at Skippy. And even that wouldn’t work at a family blog like this one. The rest are jokes that I am told–undoubtedly correctly, but lapsed traders are difficult to retrain*–are “too soon.” The Phantom Scribbler came out of her retirement (first post in more than eleven months), though, […]

Farm subsidies and entrenched wealth

Lynne Kiesling writes Farm subsidies and entrenched wealth at Knowledge Problem: Veronique de Rugy has a great argument for ending farm subsidies in the April issue of Reason (and yes, do read the whole thing, well worth your time). Farm subsidies are the canonical example of the dynamics of Mancur Olson’s Logic of Collective Action […]