Stairway to Serfdom I posted the above chart four days ago in “From Social Distance to Social Justice” to illustrate Arthur Dahlberg’s argument about the eventual consequences of a declining labor share of income. Dahlberg was inspired by Stephen Leacock’s The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice and both Leacock and Dahlberg were influenced by Thorsten Veblen. The chart […]
Matt Yglesias has a good piece up explaining why “opening” the economy now won’t save the economy. The reason is that people will continue to avoid contact with others until the epidemic is brought under control. Simply allowing restaurants, theaters, and workplaces to open will not change this basic fact. Indeed, airlines are still open […]
Advocates of quickly ending the shutdowns are in the news. Mostly, because one of them is President. Like most Americans, I think reopening soon would be a mistake (and remember I am in Italy where the shut down is severe compared to any State in the USA). I’m just going to assume that reopening by […]
The Usual Deficit Blather from the New York Times The Times today ran a truly execrable article warning us that, once the virus has passed, we will suffer dire consequences from the runup of government debt. As most readers know, this argument is theoretically illiterate, derived from the false comparison between household and government debt. We’ve been […]
A bit of a post-mortem on my last post. Andrew Gelman discusses the Santa Clara county study here. He focuses on sample imbalances, selection bias, and especially the way the authors deal with the specificity of the test. See his post for the gory details, but he is quite critical of the study, to the […]
What the Index of Leading Indicators tells us about the 2020 Presidential election One of the better econometric models that I made use of back in 2016 was that by Prof. Robert S. Erickson of Columbia University and Prof. Christopher Wlezien of the University of Texas at Austria, entitled “Forecasting the Presidential Vote with leading economic […]
Jason Brennan has a new post up doubling down on his earlier criticism of epidemiologists and government policy in response to the COVID crisis. I responded to his earlier blog posts here. I am still not convinced, but there are useful lessons to be learned from going through his argument. Brennan continues to claim that […]
(Dan here…simultaneous and probably related is the declining testing being done currently, and the federal lack of keeping track of nursing home and other long term care facilities deaths, as this group double downs on the “re-0pening” without precaution.) Washington Post reports: If all roads in Michigan lead to the state capitol, conservative protesters on […]
Prairie du Chien Selects Jill Karofsky Over David Kelly! I have previously posted on the highly swingy politicsal nature of southwestern Wisconsin, symbolized by the town there at the mouth of the Wisconsin River, French-founded Prairie du Chien (named for an Indian cheif, it turns out, who was “Dog of the Prairie” in English). It […]
Trump Defunds WHO and USPS: Will Motherhood and Apple Pie Be Next? Yes, Trump is out to cut the roughly half a billion $ US contribution to the $6 billion budget of the World Health Organization (WHO). It seems that he now sees his path to reelection to be based on blaming China for the […]