by New Deal democrat at Bonddad blog Re-posted with author’s permission. Greg Mankiw: as duteous to the vices of plutocracy as badness would require There is a drastic moral difference between those who write garbage analysis because they are mistaken, and those who write garbage analysis that is loathesome. Greg Mankiw embarrasses Harvard with an […]
As a small economist, my views are not seriously taken seriously. But still, if I turn out to be right, I will have bragging rights. So Paul Krugman wrote today about how the IMF way over-estimated the potential growth path of GDP. His post is titled, The Damage Done… “That’s a huge shortfall. Yet the […]
I learned a fact from Chris Dillow who went on to conjecture that “consumers -in aggregage – have genuine foresight” I agree that “confidence” is a non-explanation for fluctuations in consumer spending. Such fluctuations can, for the most part, be explained by observable economic variables such as incomes, unemployment and credit availability, as John Muellbauer, […]
Republicans seem obsessed with the idea that Obamacare is a failure; that it is a “train wreck” exacerbating unemployment. But is that really so? First of all, the claim that the Affordable Care Act is a job killer flies in the face of reality, as Dan Diamond at Forbes reports: Since the law was signed […]
Shocked by House Majority Leader Eric Cantor’s defeat in last week’s Virginia primary, many in the media have decided that this “earthquake” has re-shaped the political landscape. Immigration reform is dead, they say, and tea party radicals are far stronger than many suspected. Meanwhile, the alarmists warn, political polarization has divided the country, poisoning our […]
The Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade pacts, the increased desire to ‘invert’ ownership and headquarters by ‘American’ companies, TISA (published only by Wikileaks?), points us to a world managed by what organizations? Via Alternet comes a note in TISA, a trade agreement that tries to frame itself in the private/government rhetoric, but we need to […]
From the BBC comes a note on a crowd control drone: South Africa-based Desert Wolf told the BBC it had secured the sale of 25 units to a mining company after showing off the tech at a trade show. It is marketing the device as a “riot control copter” that can tackle crowds […]
Today, “Economist’s View showcased Paul Krugman’s latest NYT article“Veterans and Zombies”. Paul discusses how the hyped-up VA issues are being used as an example of under performing government healthcare to emphasize how bad the much larger PPACA healthcare reform could be if allowed to proceed. Of course this is not true; but both Mark and […]
Anecdotal evidence, the basis of so much journalism prior to the rise of the data movement and still, to my mind, over-relied upon — is just that: anecdotal. Roughly 65,000 people voted in the Cantor-Brat primary; Brat won by more than 7,200 votes. Assuming that what a non-scientific sample of 1, 10 or even 100 […]
Sandwichman at Econospeak points us to common threads in a blast from the past: Economic science: “this magazine of untruth” The complaint one makes against that anti-social jargon, which so easily passes for economic science, is that it is in ludicrous opposition to the common observation of facts. Political economy professes to be a science […]