Invictus at The Big Picture notes that, as recent recoveries from recessions go, the current “recovery” has the best private-sector hiring of the past three. Source:  St. Louis Fed Expansion Charts via The Big Picture Go read the whole thing.

No Foolin’

I’m in Kansas City, where the Royals have started the season as one would expect of the current iteration of the team. Fortunately, I’m not here for the baseball, but rather for the Kauffman Economics Bloggers Forum. There will be presentations tomorrow (agenda here; homepage for live streaming here) in three session. The morning features […]

Brad DeLong culls the comments to this post at Crooked Timber to produce a “with notably rare exceptions” Greatest Hits package—his second post riffing on the original—in honor of The Maestro continuing to attempt to improve the reputations of Paul Volcker and Ben Bernanke, if not G. William (“I ran a company, I didn’t need […]

Go read Mark Thoma. Because he’s a kinder, gentler human being than I am: The time to stand up to the budget busting was when it happened, and when members of the list had the power to affect policy, not many years later in an article at Politico. Many on the list were either part […]

I give up. It was perfectly obvious what was happening at Fukushima on Saturday afternoon, when I posted bullet points at Skippy: there was going to be a major cleanup cost and the live reactors were not salvageable, but nothing fatal to many was loose in the atmosphere yet. Which is why I followed up […]

In a perfect world, you use distilled HOH to cool and control a nuclear reactor. In a flawed world, you use potable HOH and hope nothing damages the reactor in the longer term. In an emergency, especially one where potable HOH is going to be in short supply and you are near the coast, you […]

AB, late Thursday: If you want to stop a dictator from killing his people, freeze any of his personal assets that are held out of the country. In cases where the dictator is likely to fall, it sends a clear signal to other countries. (In cases where the dictator is likely to succeed, the worst […]

Peter Dorman at Econospeak, who is smarter and nicer than I am,* boils down the question: [D]o you believe that managers normally make the right decisions over how to run organizations? If you believe that premise, please explain: Why all those great managers of the late 1940s through the mid-1970s ran defined benefit contribution plans, […]