Linda is returning to blogging again.  Welcome back.   Dan by Linda Beale Finance Committee acts/doesn’t act on important Tax Court, Social Security, and HHS Appointments As the Senate Finance Committee continued work on its markup yesterday, it approved several important nominees for positions in the Social Security Administration and in the Tax Court, but […]

– by New Deal democrat The new parsimony I came across the below graph showing that relationship of average household net worth with average debt vs. the personal savings rate from the NY Fed last week (h/t The Conversable Economist): The important point was that the relationship has changed since the Great Recession.  Even though […]

by Joseph Joyce The People’s Verdict on Globalization The similarities in the electoral appeals of businessman Donald Trump and Senator Bernie Sanders have been widely noted (see, for example, here, here and here). Both men attract voters who feel trapped in their economic status, unable to make progress either for themselves or their children. Moreover, […]

by Sandwichman Zero-Sum Foolery 4 of 4: Wage Prisoner’s Dilemma Soon after the wages-fund doctrine fell out of favor with economists, it was immediately attributed to trade unionists under the label of the “fixed work-fund fallacy” and then the “Theory of the lump of labour.” In denunciations of the lump-of-labor fallacy, it has become fashionable […]

by Sandwichman Foolery 1: Games Theory Gamesmanship Foolery 2: Doomsday Climate Machine Zero-Sum Foolery 3 of 4:  Forecast Factory Long before the issue of anthropogenic climate change arrived on the doomsday agenda, Lewis F. Richardson anticipated climate modeling with his failed attempt to forecast weather numerically. His calculations predicted surface pressures 150 times higher than observed: […]

by Lynn Paramour (via  Alternet) Is the 1% Really the Problem? “We are the 99 percent” is a great slogan, but is it distracting our attention from a sinister reality? There’s strong evidence that it’s not the 1 percent you should worry about—it’s the 0.1 percent. That decimal point makes a big difference. … The 99 […]

by Peter Dorman  (originally  from Econospeak) Good Jobs for Non-College Grads It’s good to see that Katherine Newman has spoken up for really investing in kids who aren’t going on to college, which will always be a substantial chunk of them, no matter what.  If there’s any sort of social contract worth defending, it has to […]