Dan here… Gail is an actuary interested in finite world issues – oil depletion, natural gas depletion, water shortages, and climate change. Oil limits look very different from what most expect, with high prices leading to recession, and low prices leading to inadequate supply. Her blog Our Finite World offers an extensive look at these issues. […]
Hospitals are just not producing at the same rate they used to. In particular, they are not producing as many avoidable deaths. Wide-ranging efforts to make hospital care safer have resulted in an estimated 50,000 fewer patients dying because of avoidable errors in the past three years, according to a new report presented by government […]
I have often wondered whether the very low level of Private Residential Investment (also known as building houses) in the USA is due to unusually low expectations of long term increases in home prices. Here, I add that I would guess that the change was and end of the belief that the relative prices of […]
I keep telling people that the German euro is undervalued, but some folks seem not to believe me. (See the comments section from this post last year for an example.) But this is a really big deal. The dominant narrative about the eurozone crisis is that fiscally irresponsible countries like Greece were bringing the once-proud […]
Given that title, I’m not sure I need to write a post, since no one will read this post which is really a comment on Simon Wren-Lewis’s post “Left, Right and Macroeconomic Competence.” I thought this title was less openly twitty than “Commenting on Wren-Lewis,” but I will go on to comment on Brad DeLong […]
Lifted from comments from this post, Angry Bear Spencer England further explains oil and markets: Oil production is an unusual business in that virtually all of the cost of getting crude to the refiner is fixed costs while variable cost or current spending is insignificant. Economic theory, at least what you will learn if you […]
Via Dailykos, the story points to the lack of information on police-related killings: … But as Lee (and other reporters) have pointed out, these numbers, striking as they are, just aren’t reliable. Together with some colleagues and help from criminologists, Richard Florida atThe Atlantic magazine’s CityLab took a look in August at the available statistics […]
Bloomberg news points to continued trends in oil production and prices. Yves Smith also comments here. …Conventional oil producers in OPEC can no longer dictate prices, United Arab Emirates Energy Minister Suhail Al-Mazrouei said in an interview on Nov. 26. Newcomers to the market who have the highest costs and created the glut should […]
My reaction was “tell me something I don’t know already” when I read that phase 1 trials of an Ebola vaccine at the National Institutes of Health have shown that it is safe. My dad works on the NIH campus and he told me about the trial weeks ago. The results were recently published. Trials […]