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

IN COVENTRY designation on the sidebar

Please note that any name in the jail has lost the right to participate in Angry Bear discussions, as agreed by a coalition of left, center, and right groups on the blog. Please do not respond to persons in jail…these persons refused to respond to reminders for hostility and rude statements.

More on infant mortality: What’s with the USA

A post based on joint work with Tilman Tacke got 45 comments which is a lot for one of my posts. Many were excellent. One weak point is that people seem a bit obsessed with the USA. The post discussed cross country regressions with 71 countries (The first comment started “Why only 71 countries?”). The […]

Op-ed on what Social Security is for: plain bread not cake and good enough if you retired now

op-ed by reader coberly A MODEST NOTE on the use of Present Value in Social Security propaganda I should begin by saying that I have nothing against the use of present value (PV) calculations being used to make honest comparisons between various options across time. What I am concerned with here is that they can […]

Dueling Mooses

by reader noni mousa Dueling Mooses — Kristol tries to confuse the issue — FAIL! William Kristol (NYT today) defends Palin as a VP pick. Are we convinced? Here, see what he says: Should voters be alarmed by a relatively young or inexperienced vice-presidential candidate? No. Since 1900, five vice presidents have succeeded to the […]

Daniel Davies’s Three Laws Summarized

Via the sainted and gorgeous Bess Levin at Dealbreaker the erudite Felix Salmon at Portfolio.com, Michael Giberson at Knowledge Problem summarizes why even a Bush Administration initiative that might have had an upside falls victim to Daniel Davies’s Three Laws: In response to disruptions caused by Hurricane Gustav, the DOE has indicated a willingness to […]

Oil as an excuse for Bush et al’s economic performance

by Divorced one like Bush From comments in Cactus’ post: “Now in the last couple of years we have seen unprecedented oil prices that have sapped our economy’s strength.” Yes, we have. Others have presented this argument. However,there was plenty of information in existence long before the “last couple of years” regarding the issue of […]

Public and Private Health Care Spending and Infant Mortality in 71 countries

by Tilman Tacke and Robert Waldmann We don’t know if someone else has noticed this amazing fact: in a cross country regression, the ratio of public health care spending to GDP is negatively correlated with the infant mortality rate as one would expect, but the share of private health care spending in GDP is positively […]

Economic trouble

by cactus Back in January, I had a post entitled Why is the Economy in Trouble? Seriously, Why is the Economy in Trouble?. If I may quote myself extensively (and I may!!): [W]hy is the economy in a state where even rational people are talking about the need for stimulus only a few years after […]

Compare and Contrast

by CoRev and Rdan Let’s compare the two candidates policies, major component by major component. It will not be easy because they are both extensive but modestly detailed. Furthermore, you the reader will have to do some work by reading their plans. So let’s get started with “Energy” because it is, to my mind the […]

Unfunded Liability Bookended

In the last installment of this Social Security series we kind of dug into some of the details of unfunded liability, what it was and what it wasn’t and most importantly where the incidence occured: in the past or in the future. Backwards Transfer is Back. In the course of that I think it became […]