Animated wonder
U.S. Population Distribution by Age, 1900 through 2060 (Bill McBride,Calculated Risk) Animated wonder.
Institutions and markets
David Zetland at Aguanomics ponders the interplay of institutions and markets (reposted with authors permission). LocaL conditions in this context are those conditions in a watershed area. This is what I mean by institutions I wrote this for some partners on our water project, and I post it here because it seems to give a […]
Can Spain Achieve What Ireland And Latvia Did?
From Social Europe Journal comes more analysis of using Ireland as the standard success story for austerity (re-posted with permisson from the author and SEJ): Can Spain Achieve What Ireland And Latvia Did? BY RONALD JANSSEN Advice from a ‘very serious European’. Picking up on the IMF’s report on the Spanish economy and its call […]
Les Misérables
Via Alternet comes this quote from Victor Hugo in Les Miserables: Victor Hugo described this war with the poor in Les Misérables as one between the “egoists” and the “outcasts.” The egoists, Hugo wrote, had “the bemusement of prosperity, which blunts the sense, the fear of suffering which is some cases goes so far as […]
Ireland, Krugman, Kenneth Thomas
Paul Krugman points to Angry Bear Kenneth Thomas in this piece in the New York Times on the use of Ireland as somehow a success story of what are failed policies regarding employment: Ireland Is The Success Story Of The Future, And Always Will Be Via Mark Thoma, Kenneth Thomas analyzes the latest attempt to […]
CORRECT PREDICTIONS AND THE STATUS OF ECONOMISTS
Vis Brad Delong’s post on CORRECT PREDICTIONS AND THE STATUS OF ECONOMISTS Paul Krugman is certainly right that history has judged, and that the judgment of history is for James Tobin over Milton Friedman so completely that there is not even a smudge left where Friedman’s approach to a monetary theory of nominal income determination […]
Open thread August 16, 2013
The Tea Party’s Disruptive Anti-Government (and anti-tax) Politics
by Linda Beale The Tea Party’s Disruptive Anti-Government (and anti-tax) Politics The New York Times ran an interesting piece by Kim Messick on the Tea Party’s psyche yesterday: Messick, The Tea Party’s Paranoid Aesthetic, New York Times (Aug. 10, 2013). It’s worth trying to understand this political group’s understanding of itself, since it ” is […]
Open thread August 13, 2013
If 401ks don’t serve many customers, we need higher Social Security benefits
Brad DeLong adds his voice to the people addressing the retirement woes of many: Edward Filene’s idea from the 1920s of having companies run employer-sponsored defined-benefit plans has, by and large, come a-crashing down. Companies turn out not to be long-lived enough to run pensions with a high enough probability. And when they are there […]