Chief Justice Roberts’ attempt to portray his decision in McCutcheon v. FEC as minimalist actually shows just how far from minimalist it is. According to the Chief Justice, no one should worry about the consequences of the Court’s decision because “there are multiple alternatives available” that would accomplish the Government’s asserted interest without, in the majority’s view, […]
Paul Krugman references a paper by NYU Stern School of Business Associate Professor Thomas Philippon that “puts it at several hundred billion dollars per year.” Three Expensive MillisecondsPaul KriugmanNew York Times Op-EdApril 13, 2014 (April 14th, 2014 Edition) …Mr. Philippon starts with the familiar observation that finance has grown much faster than the economy […]
The American Legislative Exchange Council — which authors ultra-conservative legislation and promulgates it to state legislatures nationwide — has a little index measure of states’ “competitiveness,” which supposedly results in greater prosperity for those states that rank highly. Does it? Let’s let the numbers speak for themselves: Source (PDF). Cross-posted at Asymptosis.
Reader Jan sends notice on the approval of the IPCC WGAR5 summary for policymakers pdf. (link fixed) Lifted from his e-mail, he muses: As for all IPCC reports, this one is a little thick, but can be parsed by the economically inclined. It is, on the one hand, lousy if unsurprising news. On the other […]
At the current INET conference, there was a forum presented for new ideas for teaching economics. One person who spoke was Oscar Landerretche. (begins speaking at 10:40 in video) He is the director of the School of Economics at the University of Chile in Santiago, Chile. I want to talk about his idea of […]
Yesterday, I noted that an expectations un-augmented Phillips curve fits data from the past two decades rather well. Here is an even simpler illustration of the point that lagged price inflation has not correlated with wage inflation for the past two decades. The figure is a scatter of lgwinfl — the percent annual rate of […]
Hmmm. Looks like I wasn’t the only one calling for people to use FedEx rather than UPS when given the option. Unless, of course, my new blog gets wayyyy more “page views” than I had thought.
From Howard Bashman’s How Appealing blog today: Florida’s Fifth District Court of Appeal yesterday issued a ruling in a case described as “SLAPP Happy Dog-Shooter“: The “Siouxsie Law” blog had this post about the case back in March 2010. And in July 2011, “Siouxsie Law” had a related post titled “Court rules in favor of […]
Paul Krugman notes that it is standard practice to estimate an accelerationist Phillips curve in which the change in inflation is related to unemployment. He also notes that recent data seem to form the original Phillips curve, that is the scatter of inflation on unemployment forms a curve. He asked if someone might have rolling […]
100 year old Taoist master. Photo taken in 1930’s. I have written recently about how a recession could open the door to progressive policies to reduce inequality. Of course it is crazy to call for a recession. Yet the message is one of healing. So to understand this message… let’s explore a healing principle […]