Jennifer Berkshire pointed Peter Greene to: The election of Donald J. Trump as president offers the best opportunity in decades to shrink the size and power of government and increase individual liberty. So writes the Heartland Institute, a libertarian thinky tank, on a page devoted to all the Trumpian actions they approve of. This outfit was founded in […]
Five graphs for 2017:final update At the beginning of the year, I identified 5 trends that bore particular watching, primarily as potentially setting the stage for a recession in 2018. Now that the year is ending, how did they turn out? #5 Gas Prices One potential pressure point on the economy was gas prices, which […]
(Dan B. here…I think it is still appropriate as it is a lesson yet to be learned.) by Divorced one like Bush (2009) I think it’s time to reread the World Bank report on what creates wealth because it seems that the arguments against the stimulus are from a mind-set of very narrow thinking […]
K-12 Student Loan Industry By MaryAnn Schlegel Ruegger via AlterNet: The GOP tax bill’s inclusion of 529 plans for K-12 private tuition has been widely criticized as yet one more provision that aids the wealthy. That’s because only wealthy families have enough money on hand to sock away $10,000 a year toward each child’s K-12 private school tuition…. … […]
Evergreen: So Much Stranger than That I’m a professor at Evergreen State College, currently on leave. Last year I lived through the events that were captured on videotape and brought the college a lot of unwanted publicity. As a social scientist, long interested in organization theory and social movements, I found the experience grimly fascinating, […]
By Steve Roth (originally published at Evonomics) You Don’t Own That! The Evolution of Ownership Get off my lawn. (repost) In a recent post on the “evolution of money,” which concentrated heavily on the idea of (balance-sheet) assets, I promised to come back to the fundamental idea behind “assets”: ownership. Herewith, fulfilling that promise. There are a […]
From a Department of Energy report entitled Revolution… Now; The Future Arrives for Five Clean Energy Technologies – 2016 Update a nifty graph: (click to embiggen) If the graph is remotely accurate, these are large cost reductions. Accompanying the graph is this verbage: Decades of investments by the federal government and industry in five key […]
By Steve Roth (2015) Did Money Evolve? You Might (Not) Be Surprised You probably won’t be surprised to know that exchange, trade, reciprocity, tit for tat, and associated notions of “fairness” and “just deserts” have deep roots in humans’ evolutionary origins. We see expressions of these traits in capuchin monkeys and chimps (researchers created a “cash economy” […]
Worth a discussion at the least: By Masha Gessen Gessen is the author of nine books, including “The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia. The New Yorker 23 December 17 Donald Trump has scored a legislative victory with staggering costs. The price of the tax bill has to be measured not only in the loss American society […]
Other than a small number of fiscal conservatives who are ignored by their own party, it doesn’t seem like anyone really cares about the National Debt any more. That’s a relatively new thing. Doing something about the Debt was one of the platforms of the GW Bush campaign in 2000. Of course, what he actually […]