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

My Twitter Exchange With Jamelle Bouie

Washington Post contributor Jamelle Bouie, or @jbouie, posted the following to a thread in Alex Seitz-Wald’s Twitter feed (or whater it’s called) about my hyphenated-names post from earlier today: Holy crap. That post would have been better if it were just “Look at this Jewry Jew Jew.” To which I responded: I don’t buy into […]

Advertising That Your Child Comes From an Upscale, Graduate-School-Educated Home and Therefore Won’t Need Financial Assistance if (When) He or She is Accepted Into Yale.

One of the really annoying (at least to me) fads among late Baby Boomers and Gen Xers, mainly, I suspect, from the Northeast and the Washington, D.C. area, is the hyphenated-last-name thing for their children.  As in, say, Alex Seitz-Wald, a Millennial blogger at the Washington Post’s The Plum Line, whose post from this morning, […]

Why Banks are “Special”: The Short Story

No, not that kind of “special.” Though it sure is tempting… Paul Krugman, Scott Sumner (seemingly unlikely bedfellows, but…), and most other mainstream economists want to argue that banks are not special — that there’s no reason for economists to understand and analyze their operations in detail, or incorporate those understandings in their (mental and formal) economic […]

“Willful blindness”

The example presented of a community and willful blindness is concrete enough to be useful for a conversation I believe, and to mean something to readers in general. There is the risk the term ‘willful blindness’ be bandied about and misused as happened in prior years with the term ‘cognitive dissonance’, a term thrown like […]

The PPACA and Healthcare Sky is Falling Again . . .

Huh? Repeal the PPACA to Help Hispanics and African-Americans ? ? ? Crooks and Liars carries a conversation by Repub Senator Ted Cruz with Candy Crowley on CNN. Senator Ted Cruz of Texas is making it his crusade to repeal the PPACA so as not to cause harm to the most vulnerable of America who […]

Contra Hall

Robert Hall wrote a paper (pdf warning)which is getting attention from Krugman, DeLong and their slavish follower uh here. Neither DeLong nor Krugman is convinced, but both are respectfully doubtful, because sometimes that which seems to be arrogant recklessness is not pointless Hall used to be famous at MIT for talks along the lines of […]

Median wages and employment to population ratio

From colleague New Deal Democrat at the Bondadd blog comes this comment and clarification regarding the reporting from this post at Angry Bear: I have left this comment elsewhere, because there is widespread misreporting and misunderstanding of this report. While the data is correct, the conclusion drawn by most of your readers probably is not. The […]

Ryan Avent and Graeber

by Robert Waldmann Ryan Avent has some fun with Graeber.  Click for the article but here is a summary. Graeber “The ruling class has figured out that a happy and productive population with free time on their hands is a mortal danger”. [skip] Avent (my bold) “Employers had to retain such workers—had to pay them […]