As far as I can could tell, Simon Wren-Lewis has been convinced by Paul Krugman. He now proposes parallel reasearch projects one of which is to be focused on fitting the data. This is exactly what Krugman advocated. Update: clearly I couldn’t tell very far. In fact, as he has repeatedly written, Wren-Lewis always agreed […]

by Dale Coberly DAMNED LIARS AND SOCIAL SECURITY There are liars, damned liars, and “non partisan experts.” The non partisan experts are expert liars, “non partisan” because that’s the best lie of all. A damned liar need not be an expert, but he is usually pretty clever at mixing “true” facts, or at least “facts […]

“I’ve never seen a less optimistic time in my lifetime in this country and people wonder why,” the first-term Republican governor said at the Bush Institute Conference on Taxes and Economic Growth in New York City. “I think it’s really simple. It’s because government’s now telling them ‘stop dreaming, stop striving, we’ll take care of […]

by Mike Kimel From an article in the NY Times: Politicians sometimes say that lower tax rates lead to higher economic growth, which in turn leads to higher overall tax revenue. This may have been true in the early 1960s, when the top tax rate was 91 percent, but the top tax rate today is […]

I see that his blog Mankiw shows a chart of the employment population ratio to make a comment about the “so called recovery”. But he selected the start date of the chart so that you could not see that during the eight years of the Bush administration the employment-population fell from 63.0 to 60.3, a […]

by Michael Halasy Drug shortages and the mythical marketI read an interesting article by Gehrett in the January issue of JAMA. In response to the increased utilization of generic drugs (currently about 70% of drugs used in the US), a fact which should be applauded, we have seen a frightening increase in drug shortages. In […]

Michael has written for Angry Bear in the past (see two of many Prometheus and Bundled Payments and Medical Tourism, separating facts from fiction).  He is a practicing PA in Emergency Medicine. My undergraduate education started with economics. I function as a health policy analyst for a couple of national organizations and as a health […]

by Linda Beale More on Private Equity, Carried Interest, Wealth, and Romney Those who’ve read much of this blog are aware of the various arguments against the notion that private equity firms are “do-gooders” that we should encourage and even subsidize (through the carried interest provision). On the whole, I believe they are part of […]

The employment report was a major disappointment. Payroll employment rose some 120,000, significantly less than the over 200,000 anticipated. Moreover, the household survey displayed a-31,000 drop in employment. The unemployment rate did tick down from 8.3%to 8.2%. But that was largely because the labor force fell -164,000 Moreover, the average work week fell from 34.6 […]