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

Barkley Rosser’s Review of Behavioral Economics (ROBE) Website Goes Live

Review of Behavioral Economics (ROBE) Website Goes Live Amazingly enough, today on my 65th birthday, the website of the new journal that I am Editor-in-Chief of, the Review of Behavioral Economics (ROBE), has gone live.  So, we are open for business at http://www.nowpublishers.com/…. Prof. J. Barkley Rosser  .

"Of Property" and the Mercantilist Fallacy

  Sandwichman at Econospeak offers a look at a piece of history: “Of Property” and the Mercantilist Fallacy “Though the earth, and all inferior creatures, be common to all men, yet every man has a property in his own person: this no body has any right to but himself. The labour of his body, and the work of his […]

How high does senior poverty have to go?

It’s official: President Obama has proposed cutting Social Security by replacing the program’s current inflation adjustment with the stingier “chained” Consumer Price Index. As I’ve discussed before, this risks undoing all the progress made against senior poverty since the passage of Medicare and Medicaid in 1965. 25% of seniors were poor according to official poverty […]

Tis New to Thee

I step out of the dark bathroom. (Really, the light is out and we’re around 26,000 feet—pretty certain it’s the even numbers if you’re flying West.) Wandering back to my seat, I see multiple people using electronic devices, including one gentleman who is listening to an album of Iggy Pop’s.  I know this because his […]

…exceeding $3 million in such accounts is not very difficult for an individual

Greg Mankiw suggests a part of the new budget proposed by President Obama affects 401k and IRA accounts. Some comment in general retirement accounts from AB starts here. Apparently, President Obama’s budget is going to include some kind of penalty for people who have accumulated more than $3 million in retirement accounts.  The details are not […]

How Money Moves

The title should actually be “How Dollar Bills Move,” but it’s not as alliterative. A fascinating item on the work of Dirk Brockmann, who’s used WheresGeorge.com to map the movement of dollar bills, and the boundaries over which they’re least likely to cross: I have no idea what to do with this, or whether it […]