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

Covid Pandemic Causes the Biggest Drop in U.S. Life Expectancy

Black and Brown Americans suffer the most in biggest U.S. drop in life expectancy since WWII, Modern Healthcare, June 2021 In an earlier post listing a series of articles I thought might be interesting to AB, this one Modern Healthcare article was listed as one of interest. I decided to expand on the article and […]

Classical liberalism and the politics of white grievance

It is an unfortunate fact that many think tanks funded by conservative plutocrats and nominally devoted to spreading free-market ideas actively foster the politics of white grievance.  I believe the evidence for this claim is quite strong, but it is not always immediately obvious that this is happening.  Classical liberals and libertarians generally do not […]

House prices continue to surge, with affordability near its worst since the Great Recession

House prices continue to surge, with affordability near its worst since the Great Recession   The FHFA and Case Shiller house price indexes for May and April, respectively, were released this morning. Because housing affordability is very much an issue, let’s take a look. YoY the FHFA index is up 15.7%, and the Case Shiller […]

Socially Necessary Labour Time: outline of a review

Socially Necessary Labour Time: outline of a review I have excerpted all the passages in Capital and Theories of Surplus Value in which Marx explicitly discusses the concept of socially necessary labour time by name and will go through them in manageable chunks. My first pass through the excerpts suggests to me that 13 segments would be a reasonable […]

Getting to a “Yes” Affirmation on the Covid Vaccine

“Getting to Yes: COVID Vaccine Edition,” Ken Haller, June 25, 2021 Pediatrician Dr. Ken Haller comes by way of AB Commenter and blogger Professor Joel Eissenberg. You can find Ken’s commentary on his site “Ken Haller.” Just follow the article title link or click on his name. If you have not been vaccinated yet, you […]

Coronavirus dashboard for June 28: comparisons with one year ago as “delta” spreads

Coronavirus dashboard for June 28: comparisons with one year ago as “delta” spreads Let’s begin this installment with a look at vaccinations by county from a different source that a reader pointed me to last week, COVIDactnow:  The urban/rural and Red State/Blue State divides are pretty obvious. Conor Kelly (whose work I was highlighting one year ago) also […]

Improvements to Angry Bear blog

Dear readers, There are upcoming improvements to the function and looks of Angry Bear which are intended to enhance the readability, searchability, and usefulness of current posts and of the 20,000 posts of our blog from 2003 to now. The look of the site includes a wider width of the overall page, adjusted overall font […]

Manufacturing Process for Semiconductors Today. Could There be Better Supply Results?

“Could it be a better result? By this, I mean should there really have been an extreme shortage and long lead times?” A fellow writer was an engineer at OnSemi. As he stated once, his job was watching the crystals (future “wafer material) grow. More coming on this comment shortly. You will not be experts […]