Jobless claims still point to over 20,000,000 lost jobs in April, 15%+ unemployment rate As I’ve written in the past few weeks, the number of initial jobless claims correlates roughly with the number of net new jobs added or subtracted in any given month. Normally there is too much noise for it to be of […]
The actual US coronavirus trajectory: “flattening the curve” at least until 2021 “Flattening the curve” was not such an appetizing option either, because it meant that *everybody* got infected with the disease during the period of flattening, and so the death toll would still be horrifying, perhaps 1% to 3%. It also meant that the […]
Abbreviated Coronavirus dashboard for April 23: New York accounts for ALL of the US’s progress No big changes today, and since a picture is worth 1000 words, let me let the graphs speak pretty much for themselves. 1. Daily infections for the US as a whole continue to look like they are trending slightly down […]
Bad news from China. There was not a statistically significant benefit for patients with severe Covid 19 in the large Chinese controlled trial of Remdesivir for patients with severe Covid 19. The death rate was actually a tiny bit higher in the treated group. New data on Gilead’s remdesivir, released by accident, show no benefit […]
by Dale Coberly The Social Security Trustees Report is out. SS now in “short term actuarial insolvency” Much (lies) will be made of this. The Report does not lie, but it does obscure the fact that a 2% increase in the payroll tax will still solve the problem. the one tenth percent per year gradual […]
It should be worth noting that the federal deficit under Trump is already at 5% of GDP even before the Coronavirus stimulus begins. Figure 1 Interestingly, if you look at the long term record the only policy or strategy that fits the data is the Republican policy of starve the beast. That policy is to […]
Rates of testing, positive tests, and new infections by State So that I don’t lose them, I wanted to publish both the rates of testing (and positive tests) by State, as well as the (Rt) or rate of new infections for each. Both of these are as of last week. Here is the rate of […]
Where Are People Dying Most Intensively Now of SARS-Cov-2? I am putting this up because I have been hearing seeing people making claims about this that do not agree with what I have just seen at Statista for today, the 50th anniversary of the first Earth Day, for deaths per million according to the pandemic […]
(Dan here…a day late to AB better than not) Happy Sesquicentennial Birthday, Vladimir Lenin! (Oh, And Happy Half Century Earth Day) A half century ago today was the first Earth Day, which I paerticipated in while at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Although I did not know him well, I even met the founder of the […]
Stairway to Serfdom I posted the above chart four days ago in “From Social Distance to Social Justice” to illustrate Arthur Dahlberg’s argument about the eventual consequences of a declining labor share of income. Dahlberg was inspired by Stephen Leacock’s The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice and both Leacock and Dahlberg were influenced by Thorsten Veblen. The chart […]