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

F-35 and sequester dollars and cents

With constant delays due to significant engineering issues and design flaws, the cost of the F-35 has risen to $395.7 billion. But that’s just to build the planes. When you add in the cost of testing, operations and support, it will cost an additional $1.1 trillion — bringing the overall price tag to an incomprehensible […]

Delivering water quality to the tap

Delivering water quality to the tap I’m now in Kiev (looking into their water utility regulation), and a typical problem has popped up, i.e., the difficulty in delivering water quality to the tap. The physical layout of water systems — taking raw water from ground or surface sources, treating it, pumping it through large pipes […]

To centralize or not to centralize?

http://www.aguanomics.com/2013/04/to-centralize-or-not-to-centralize.html   Tcentralize or not to centralize? o I’ve run into many instances of a struggle between small- and large-scale governance, e.g., local vs. regional or national water management. These struggles occur over money, regulations, water allocations, and so on. I can see why they happen — someone in power decides to take over responsibilities […]

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 […]