by Joseph Joyce   A Guide to the (Financial) Universe: Part 1 A decade after the global financial crisis, the contours of the financial system that has emerged from the wreckage are becoming clearer. While the capital flows that preceded the crisis have diminished in size, most of the assets and liabilities they created remain. But […]

I’m teaching “Economics for Non-Economists” this semester. This is an interesting experiment, and is strongly testing my belief that you can teach economics without mathematics so long as people understand graphs and tables. (It appears that people primarily learn how to read graphs and tables in mathematics-related courses. Did everyone except me know this?) Since […]

by Cactusman What Happened to the Political Price for Lying? (Part 2) Recently I wrote about the political price of lying and how there is a serious disconnect between voters (including republican voters) saying they want honesty in a politician and how they act. My initial conclusion was that many voters are lying to themselves […]

Can Nudging Become A New Road To Serfdom? Last weekend I attended a conference at NYU Law School on “Behavioral Economics and the New Paternalism, organized by Austrian economist Mario Rizzo and classical liberal law professor Richard Epstein. It included economists, lawyers, philosophers, and a couple of psychologists.  While there was a range of views […]

Low response rates are a problem for pollsters. The worst problem is candidate specific response bias in which supporters of one candidate are more likely to respond than supporters of another. This can make polls worthless. It is interested to the other very hard problem of predicting who will actually vote. I am thinking of […]

by Cactusman What Happened to the Political Price for Lying? (Part one of two) James Comey’s recent interview on ABC has resurrected questions about the importance of honesty in public officials. One of the key themes of Comey’s interview, and apparently his soon-to-be-released book, is that Donald Trump is “morally unfit” to be president because, […]

Steve Hutkins of Save the Post Office blog also reviewed the WSJ/Citigroup analysis of the Amazon – USPS agreement in the second half of his article, “Fake News, Flawed Analysis, and Bogus Tweets,” April 8 on Angry Bear. As noted in the first half on Steve’s article presented at Angry Bear; Trump’s tweet about the […]

Is the US economy booming? April 2018 update Back in January, I asked if the economy was “booming.” There’s no official definition, but based on my recollection of the two periods I have lived through that felt like booms, the1960s and late 1990s, the two times in my life that the feel of an economic […]

(Dan here…lifted from Robert’s Stochastic Thoughts) Thoughts on Capehart on Kagan I ì’m reading the Washington Post and note one very outstanding op-ed by Catharine Rampell which you should just read. She links to excellent summaries of social science research and notes that Republicans don’t listen to experts and aren’t reality based.But I want to write about […]