Relevant and even prescient commentary on news, politics and the economy.

Patterns of buying food changing?

The cost of hand-to-mouth living – Financial Times: A few weeks ago, when I was chatting with the head of one of America’s largest food and drink companies, he made a revealing comment about data flows. Like most consumer groups, this particular company is currently spending a lot of money to monitor its customers with […]

Scott Sumner Goes Marxist, Proposes Targeting Labor’s Share of Income

I’m joking of course. He’s still grinding the supply-side axe (though judiciously here, IMO). But you gotta admire a fellow when he follows the logic of the data where his own logic requires him to go. He’s just done three posts about Germany’s growth and unemployment rates through the great recession: Annualized change, Q1 2006 […]

Is Margaret Thatcher Responsible for Silicon Valley, As David Brooks Claimed Recently?

[T]he myth of the welfare state fostering a lazy citizenry just doesn’t hold water. A group of small nations (combined population: about 25 million) that came up with Linux, Skype, Ikea, H&M, and Lego — to say nothing of well-written television shows and mystery novels, innovative designers and brilliant architects from Alvar Aalto to Bjarke […]

Shorter Niall Ferguson

Shorter Niall Ferguson. Keynes was so  totally gay that he would never write about Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren. update: Ferguson has apologized very fully,  firmly denouncing his comment on Keynes, sexuality, and time horizons. I’m sure that Ferguson will retract, in the long run, all he’s said.

Court approval

Common Dreams points us to an aspect of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court most of us have probably not followed: A secret federal court last year did not deny a single request to search or electronically spy on people within the United States “for foreign intelligence purposes,” according to a Justice Department report this week. […]

Trans-Pacific Partnership and US European Union free trade

Via Naked Capitalism comes more comment on two major global trade agreements also discussed here at Angry Bear. I keep wondering when our national conversation will get around to acknowledging ‘pro-business’ as having a second question to answer: which businesses mostly benefit and which lose out? And a third: what are the rules of free […]

Pro-business decisions

New York Times points us to a new study on the Robert’s Supreme Court decisions and ‘pro-business’. NOT long after 10 a.m. on March 27, a restless audience waited for the Supreme Court to hear arguments in the second of two historic cases involving same-sex marriage. First, however, Justice Antonin Scalia attended to another matter. […]