“worse than you imagine possible even taking into account the fact that it is worse then you imagine possible” — Brad DeLong OK so Gary Johnson former governor and libertarian candidate for president asked Mike Barnicle “What’s Aleppo”. This is shocking and appalling, but the New York Times managed to top it. I will assume […]

I struggled with whether to add this to Sandwichman’s post or start anew. This is along the lines of what he might talk about in preserving Labor by limiting hours when there is only so much work to be done. Take note on how Sweden handled it as compared to the US. In the US, […]

I just signed this change.org petition, the information it provides which stunned and sickened me: Petitioning Utah State House Gas chambers have no place in our animal shelters   Petition by Caitlin HallidayKaysville, Utah 192,435 Supporters   Sign Caitlin’s petition   Nobody wants to put a pet to sleep. The process is heartbreaking, even in […]

Hillary Clinton’s current campaign manager kept a list of people who were not to receive State Department jobs being doled out — just as the new secretary of state entered the Obama administration — The Post has exclusively learned. “We are beginning the process of separating people we may want to hire from people we […]

I have posted this graph before. Here is updated data. The graph plots labor share (left) against the unemployment rate (bottom) since 1948 to 2ndQ 2016. (data at FRED) The data points suggest a labor supply limit shown by the down-sloping red line.  As labor share drops, unemployment tends to bottom out at higher levels. […]

by Mike Kimel Spotting BS as a Mechanism for Reaching a Wide Range of Conclusions – A Case Study I was reading up on alternative ways to deal with terrorism and stumbled on something called the Aarhus model.  It seems like much of Europe, the Danish city of Aarhus (population of about 320K) had a […]

by Mike Kimel Labor, Immigration, and Democrats of Today v. Democrats of 1989 Lifted from comments I made to this post: In 1989 plus or minus a year, I went to see Cesar Chavez speak. Its been a long time, but I have two memories of the event. The first is that every time the […]

David Weigel balances Ballance with non Ballance in this remarkable passage in which he says that public ignorance about candidate’s policy proposals is and isn’t partly Donald Trump’s fault Whose fault is that, and whose fault is it swing voters are unsure where Donald Trump stands? Not the media’s — piles and piles of money […]

‘I don’t have to show you any stinking badges.’ Perusing Palgrave’s Dictionary of Political Economy from 1894 alerted me to the odd interaction of a pair of distinctions. The first distinction was between the study of “what is” and “what ought to be.” The second distinction was between “economic science” (or “economics”) and “political economy.” Economic science presumably […]