Earlier this month, the Government Accounting Office released a report entitled Countering Violent Extremism”. Its a great example of how to outright lie using data. (I note that the, um, “analysis” was performed between October 2015 and April 2017, and bears the previous administration’s imprint. The current administration’s inanities lie in an orthogonal direction.) The […]
by Barkley Rosser Is Authoritarian Nationalism Mostly A Rural Phenomenon? Offhand it looks like maybe it is. In the US Trump won overwhelmingly in rural areas while losing all of the largest cities. Yes, he took some mid-size declining industrial ones like Youngstown, OH and Erie, Pa, while losing some rural areas in places like […]
by New Deal democrat Two hits and a miss on GDP and wages We got two pieces of good news from the GDP report this morning, and one piece of bad news for workers. First, from the important long leading housing sector, real private fixed residential investment rose again to a new post-recession high: This […]
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Via Vox: One size does not fit all: On the heterogeneous impact of free trade agreements Can empirical research on past FTAs shed light on this uncertainty? To date, most studies that quantify the effects of trade agreements have either focused on obtaining a common average effect across all agreements (e.g. Baier and Bergstrand 2007, […]
by Barkley Rosser Financial Times Messes Up On Italy I have for a long time thought the Financial Times to be the best newspaper in the world, but now I am going to play Dean Baker beating the press on it. I think they are slipping, and the sign is a story that appeared in […]
by Kenneth Thomas European Union ends relocation subsidies This isn’t actually news, but it’s news to me, and it’s something you need to know. Greg LeRoy sent me an article by James Meek in London Review of Books (20 April 2017) that he’d been sent by a friend, documenting more EU-permitted job piracy by Poland […]
Linda Greenhouse of the NYT comments: A Supreme Court quiz: Who offered this paean to judicial restraint: “If it is not necessary to decide more to a case, then in my view it is necessary not to decide more to a case”? … That was nearly 11 years ago, only eight months into his tenure. […]
by Barkley Rosser Poland: “What Are These People Complaining About?” Thus spake Jeffrey Sachs in January 1994 at the ASSA/AEA meetings shortly after the Solidarity government of Lech Walesa was defeated in an election over plans to cut old age pensions, which Sachs thought were too high. He has since recanted some of his views […]