Truth Is The Daughter Of Time This is a frontispiece to a 1951 mystery novel by Josephine Tey (real name: Elizabeth Makintosh) named _The Daughter of Time_It is about the question of whether or not King Richard III ordered the murder of the “Little Princes in the Tower,” his nephews Edward and Richard, as has […]
More Likely Bad Economic Forecasting: This Time From OECD And CBO That would be the quintessential establishment and boringly conventional Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development, the Paris-based “rich nations’” entity that grew out of the Marshall Plan and has a reputation for excellent data, and also the Congressional Budget Office, generally regarded as bipartisan […]
Being Targeted Arguably this is paranoia, but the mayor and police chief of my city do not think so and have officially reacted with a formal response. What a sign that I am an old whatever, praising local law enforcement, but, well…. So the issue is that late last evening a truck full of masked […]
Death Comes To My Old Economics Department That would be the one at my alma mater, the University of Wisconsin-Madison. I have learned that on July 6 one of its current members died, Bill Sandholm, an excellent evolutionary game theorist who was about 50 years old. It is a sign of my age that he […]
Worrying About November 3, 2020 Sigh. So the US election is now just four days less than being four months from now, and, really, anything can happen. After all, four days less than four months ago was March 11, just before the US fully recognized that we were in a pandemic, with everything closing, and […]
Wildly Off Forecasts? The macroeconomic forecasting business has become quite unhinged in the current situation, with existing models seeming to have their wheels coming off as old relationships simply do not hold and reported data seems unreliable and going in all sorts of directions. We have already seen this happen regarding forecasts that were made […]
Going Too Far Unfortunately, it was going to happen, and we who support the movement need to call out those instances where it goes too far. I am talking about the justified Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, mostly characterized by widespread peaceful protests even in small rural towns that never see such things, and with […]
Is The Possible V-Shaped Recovery Flattening As The Second Quarter Comes To An End? Probably, although it is unclear whether or not we are having a V-shaped recovery (see most recent post here). However, whatever it is, it looks like the revived spread of the coronavirus is probably slowing it somewhat. New cases are up […]
Do BLM Protests Prove No More Pandemic? It has become a widespread meme that the many protests over the murder of George Floyd and other racially based police brutality will show that it is fine to end all shutdowns related to the pandemic and end all rules about social distancing and wearing face masks. Here […]
Might There Be A V-Shaped Economic Recovery After All? Maybe. This is a matter where if it happens, I shall be proven wrong. I have mostly emphasized how much uncertainty and lack of knowledge we face about the pandemic as well as the economy in this situation, and have as a result largely stayed away […]