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 […]
Ken Houghton follows up on his previous post. One of the few honest statements that came out of the Reagan Administration was in late 1982, when the Volcker policies were working but the market was still spooked. “People expect that inflation will be higher than it will be.” The above compares the University of Michigan’s […]
Ken Houghton notes that playing with data is dangerous. Predicting the future tends to be easy. There are several ways to do it. First, you can predict that everything will grow as it did this year—or last year, or the mean of the past x years. Or you can predict that it will be great […]
With all the talk of “Detroit,” you would think that Michigan would have lost the most employees, as a percentage of same, on the year. After all, the scariest graph of the U.S. MSAs isn’t scary for nothing. But the Regional and State Employment data is out for October (h/t CR), and there’s a different […]
Congratulations to Andrew Samwick of Capital Gains and Games for being named Professor of the Year in New Hampshire.
Suppose I make my monthly budget, and assume I’m going to spend $600 for food. At the end of the month, I discover that I only spent $520. I expected to take $80 out of savings that I now do not have to. My bank account is now $80 higher than I expected it to […]