Relevant and even prescient commentary on news, politics and the economy.

A Quick One on Externalities of Foreign Trade

I won’t pretend this is part of the Vladimir Masch discussion, or one of the traditional thorough-analysis Angry Bear posts. Just a data point on which we may need to work later, and a report that will be of interest to many who read here. UPDATE: As rdan notes in comments, this “links to testing […]

How to Devalue Your Brand, Greg Mankiw Version

Greg Mankiw, clearly distracted by his former collaborator’s wife having been denied a tenured position at Harvard, quotes Fred Bergsten in the WSJ, Instapundit-style: By effectively killing “fast track” procedures that guarantee a yes-or-no vote on trade agreements within 90 days, lawmakers in Washington, led by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, have destroyed the credibility of […]

Greg Mankiw Gives Us Another Reason to Scream "Yours!"

I think he may believe it’s good news that the S&P 500 forward valuation (what we believe we might make next year, having nothing necessarily to do with current earnings or actual sales) has returned, approximately, to the level of 1998.* The problem, as I noted more than two years ago, is that, even ignoring […]

Michelle Malkin Will Get the Vapors When She Sees This

As a direct result of the six-Republican, one Democrat California Supreme Court’s decision last week, people who have shared everything for 21 years now get to marry. Pull quote: As a Japanese American, I am keenly mindful of the subtle and not so subtle discrimination that the law can impose. During World War II, I […]

Correlation is not Causation, but

J. C. Bradbury notes that early-season weather and home runs hit, while it is noted in comments that the decline is primarily in the American League and some suggestions on developing a model are made. (No, I’m not turning this into a baseball blog. There are purposes to these posts. All will be revealed.)

Just a distraction

25*30 = 750 104/750 = 13.9% For those more conversant in the “disincentives of enforcement” literature than I, can you back into the Rational Expectation of Enforcement Practices that would lead nearly 14% of a population to conclude it is maximizing utility? And, given your calculation, what would that say about the Management Practices of […]

Seen Scenes

Yes. This has been another version of Simple Answers to Simple Questions. Although, as some wag once noted, once is history, twice is parody, but the third time is a trend.

Did Part D Work?

Mark Duggan and Fiona Scott Morton published a paper at NBER with this general conclusion: Using data on product-specific prices and quantities sold in each year in the U.S., our findings indicate that Part D substantially lowered the average price and increased the total utilization of prescription drugs by Medicare recipients. Our results further suggest […]