by Peter Dorman (originally published at Econospeak) Gentrification This is the bane of urban development, right? Old housing stock, built for yesterday’s working class, is spiffed up and priced far out of reach of today’s regular folk. High end shops replace hardware stores, bric-a-brac recyclers and appliance repair centers; a tide of designer coffee flushes […]

Dan here…Angry Bear Steve Roth’s clear and thorough writing continues…please go to the original for more graphs…I could not include the largest in the Angry Bear format in its proper place.  Go straight to read more to view the whole post…. By Steve Roth (originally published at Evonomics) Insanely Concentrated Wealth Is Strangling Our Prosperity […]

A thought for Sunday: the most important issue in the 2016 election was . . . This is a post I’ve been meaning to write for several months. For a while after the election last year, there was a debate about whether the “economic anxiety” in the (white) working class was the most important factor […]

Here’s a fascinating graph from an article in the Lancet: Click to embiggen. (The figure should show deaths all the way to >95 years) The graph is a bit complicated at first, but it will convey some interesting information if you stare at it. What jumps out at me is how many more people were […]

United States Code Title 18 § 227 #TakeAKnee

by Peter Dorman (originally published at Econospeak) Ta-Nehisi Coates and the Limited Art of Interpretation Among the least persuasive writers on contemporary politics, for me, is Ta-Nehisi Coates.  Mind you, I often agree with him, but only because I agreed with him before reading him.  If I go into a piece of his with a […]

There’s a fascinating but barely-accessible-to-a-non-neurologist article about habit formation. Here is a pretty good summary, albeit with an un-helpful title: A single kind of neuron deep within the brain serves as a “master controller” of habits, new research in mice indicates. Some habits are helpful, such as automatically washing your hands before a meal or […]

The asterisk in real median household income This is a follow-up to the post I wrote last week about the latest data on real median household income. One of the things I notes is that “households” includes the millions that are composed of retirees, a burgeoning demographic due both to healthier longevities and the demographics […]

Via the Guardian comes this note from well funded groups: Conservative campaign aims to strike ‘mortal blow’ on government unions  ‘A once-in-a-lifetime chance to reverse the failed policies of the American left’