The US Constitution was their best effort to answer the question, “How should it be?” Then, they were seeking a new and better way of governance. Now, some two-hundred-forty years later, a latter-day majority of Justices on the US Supreme Court, the one charged with interpreting the Constitution, are saying, “This is how it should […]
An important reason to read history is to gain a perspective on current events. If you watch exclusively mainstream media television, particularly Fox News, you might be forgiven for the belief that things in this country are the worst they have ever been in history. “1877: America’s Year of Living Violently” by Michael Bellisiles is […]
“From his very first term, Bush shocked many by reaching who had either been convicted or pleaded guilty to crimes during the Reagan and Bush administrations’ and others who many felt should have been indicted.“ “You have a very long list of people and what emerged through the two terms was that people who seemed […]
The death of Daniel Ellsberg on Friday reminded me of his contribution to economics and his influence on my own thinking. In 1987, I was at Cornell, beginning an abortive PhD candidacy. In one of my courses there was an assigned reading on decision theory by Leonard Savage. One of the footnotes referred to an […]
As American Jews, at what point do we stop to assess the collateral damage that the coalescence of crippling student loan debt and the advancement of AI in all facets of the economy will have on America’s working and middle class? Student Loan Debt, AI and the Extinction of the American Middle Class, jewishjournal.com, Lisa […]
Does AI pose a meaningful existential threat to humanity? If an existential threat is one that can lead to mass death or human extinction, and a risk of extinction is meaningful if it is (say) at least 10% as large as the risk of a nuclear holocaust, my answer is that I have no idea. […]
Labor has gained since the pandemic, but corporations have been sucking up the lion’s share of those gains . . . – by New Deal democrat I neglected to add a link to my Weekly Indicators piece at Seeking Alpha on Saturday, so here it is. Also, I’ve been trying to understand why, with all of the […]
As of today, Trump seems well-positioned to win the Republican nomination. The basic dynamic is familiar from 2016 – Trump has a strong base of committed supporters, the opposition will likely be divided, and many Republican primaries are winner-take-all or winner-take-most. Couple this with the bump in support Trump got after his indictment in NY, […]
Why hasn’t he been here? It was maybe a decade ago when I was working for Stone Ridge, an automotive company. I was in Boston visiting a plant and picking up on their purchasing of connectors I was also cost modeling those connectors. While there, I took an evening to meet Dan Crawford for the […]
Scenes from the April employment report: the Fed just can’t kill the employment “beast” – by New Deal democrat There’s no economic news this morning, so let’s take a closer look at some important trends from last Friday’s April jobs report . As I and many others wrote, an important theme was that the deceleration […]