While Henry and Brad DeLong noted some more silly prattling from a brain-dead economist, AB readers and those wanting to maintain their sanity* will prefer The New Decembrists, and new blog from The Epicurean Dealmaker and, presumably, others. Worth it for TED’s Reformist Manifesto alone. *I do not necessarily assume that either of these sets […]

Larry Summers’s Village Idiot: I was too right to give them EVERYTHING! And now they’re being MEAN to me.

The Shrill One (tm – Brad DeLong) as Optimist: The result, then, will be high unemployment leading into the 2010 elections, and corresponding Democratic losses. These losses will be worse because Obama, by pursuing a uniformly pro-banker policy without even a gesture to popular anger over the bailouts, has ceded populist energy to the right […]

Floyd Norris is Shocked! Shocked! to Find Goldman Sachs controls Congress as well as the Treasury. Where has he been for the past three years? Imagine the reaction if, perhaps during the 1998 Asian financial crisis, a group of Republican legislators had threatened to block legislation unless a contributor to their campaigns received special treatment. […]

I would much prefer to think that all of this is a matter of his life being in turmoil throughout this decade, rather than Larry Summers being right about anything. Scott McLemee on Cornell West, with a hat tip to Henry at CT.)

Professor Keith Hart, author of the book The Memory Bank and proprietor of the blog of the same name, has graciously allowed AB to cross-post his 6,000+ word essay, A Human Economy for the Twenty-First Century. Enjoy. Our moment in history Magellan’s crew completed the first circumnavigation of the planet some thirty years after Columbus […]

No, not the 2010 World Cup draw. Countries that have more faith in the ability of people paid to protect them than the United States: Since 2002, more than 550 detainees have departed Guantanamo Bay for other destinations, including Albania, Algeria, Afghanistan, Australia, Bangladesh, Bahrain, Belgium, Bermuda, Chad, Denmark, Egypt, France, Iran, Iraq, Ireland, Jordan, […]

Chris Soghoian’s data available below, via Pando. (Background here, via Freedom to Tinker.)

We are now almost 24 months into the Great Recession. While many expect NBER will eventually say that The Great Recession ended several months ago, they have not yet. By contrast, the recession that began The Great Depression, per NBER, lasted 43 months. It seems only fair to compare the two, so I trust I […]

Today’s release by the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas of October’s Trimmed Mean Personal Consumption Expenditure gives us a chance to check this “alternative measure of core inflation.” The clearest thing is that it does what the FRB Dallas intends: generally reduces the measure of inflation: For the graphic above, any value above the line […]