Here is the abstract from a paper that appeared two years ago in Molecular Psychiatry: Intelligence is a core construct in differential psychology and behavioural genetics, and should be so in cognitive neuroscience. It is one of the best predictors of important life outcomes such as education, occupation, mental and physical health and illness, and […]
Today’s Taboo, And Where to From Here?
Do “high pressure” low unemployment economies lead to more capital investment?
by New Deal democrat Do “high pressure” low unemployment economies lead to more capitalinvestment? The Atlanta Fed’s Macroblog has an interesting article today on whether a “high pressure” low unemployment economy leads to more capital investment. At least based on surveys, they answer in the negative, with companies pulling out the old chestnut of being […]
Larry Summers: genius economist, failure at Psychology 101
by New Deal democrat Larry Summers: genius economist, failure at Psychology 101 One of my recurring themes is how macroeconomic theory, no matter how elegant mathematically, consistently errs because it fails to take into account basic psychology — i.e., how the human animal actually works. A big component of this failure is that humans, like […]
Dean Baker is Clueless On Productivity Growth
Dean Baker’s screed, Bill Gates Is Clueless On The Economy, keeps getting recycled, from Beat the Press to Truthout to Real-World Economics Review to The Huffington Post. Dean waves aside the real problem with Gates’s suggestion, which is the difficulty of defining what a robot is, and focuses instead on what seems to him to be the […]
Gates & Reuther v. Baker & Bernstein on Robot Productivity
In a comment on Nineteen Ninety-Six: The Robot/Productivity Paradox, Jeff points out a much simpler rebuttal to Dean Baker’s and Jared Bernstein’s uncritical reliance on the decline of measured “productivity growth”: Let’s use a pizza shop as an example. If the owner spends capital money and makes the line more efficient so that they can make […]
Do healthier longevity and better disability benefits explain the long term decline in labor force participation?
by New Deal democrat Do healthier longevity and better disability benefits explain the long term decline in labor force participation? A few weeks ago I took another deep dive into the Labor Force Participation Rate. There are a few loose ends I wanted to clean up (at least partially). One of the most noteworthy things […]
Open thread Feb. 28, 2017
The “Cutz & Putz” Bezzle, Graphed by FRED
by Sandwichman The “Cutz & Putz” Bezzle, Graphed by FRED anne at Economist’s View has retrieved a FRED graph that perfectly illustrates the divergence, since the mid-1990s of net worth from GDP: The empty spaces between the red line and the blue line that open up after around 1995 is what John Kenneth Galbraith called […]
A Brief History of South Africa, A Briefer History of Pre-Columbian America And How to Think About Justice
I’m no expert on South Africa, but I did some reading and pieced together a brief history of the country’s last 50,000 to 150,000 years. It begins with the San. Depending on who you ask and what evidence they are looking at, the San people have been in Southern Africa for somewhere between 50,000 to […]