Last week Mike Mandel published a very interesting chart as his nominee for the chart of the year.http://innovationandgrowth.wordpress.com/ He is using the net investment data to argue that capital spending is much smaller than generally assumed. Standard thinking is that since the early 1980s capital spending has been booming and despite cyclical swings real business […]

by Mike Kimel (Update: Naked Capitalism notes Mike’s post is the top read of the day in ‘links’) In recent years, there have been a number of studies showing that generational income mobility is particularly low in the US. To quote this 2006 study by Tom Hertz: By international standards, the United States has an […]

Krugman started it, in response to Lucas. Everyone piles on. Plutocracy Files has the list of links. (Plus don’t miss Nick Rowe’s, which includes a long comment thread.) Here’s what wows me: all these world-classical economists are accusing each other of contradicting “textbook economics,” and circling through extraordinary contortions in their efforts to reconcile that school […]

Uwe Reinhardt at Economix sums up health care policy proposals over the last decades(hat tip save the rustbelt) To describe the unifying theme running through these past variants, it is helpful to enumerate the major economic functions any health system must perform: Producing health-care goods and services. Financing health care, which involves extracting money from […]

Bloomberg notes: Fed’s Once-Secret Data Released to Public By editor Bloomberg News today released spreadsheets showing daily borrowing totals for 407 banks and companies that tapped Federal Reserve emergency programs during the 2007 to 2009 financial crisis. It’s the first time such data have been publicly available in this form.To download a zip file of […]

Via National memo comes a review of a book on the ‘Tea Party’. One might imagine the changes that worry Tea Partiers to be primarily economic. But Tea Party members rarely emphasize economic concerns. The nightmare of societal decline is usually painted in cultural hues, and the villains in the picture are freeloading social groups, […]

What’s a person to do? or ‘Motivated avoidance’  From the American Psychological Association comes two studies here and here. Individuals are often confronted with information that they do not know how to comprehend or evaluate, even though this information can be of critical importance to the self (or society as a whole). In the case […]

by Tom aka Rusty Rustbelt Health Care Thoughts: Regulatory Bumbling The people who daily manage health care services (and their advisers) have been shocked at the inability of the Obama administration to manage the administrative regs roll out process. The 2009 stimulus act contained multi-year funding for adopting electronic medical records (EMR/EHR) systems. The funding […]

by reader ilsm The Campaign to Preserve Pentagon Waste is in High Gear: From Forbes, Defense Advocate Loren Thompson:  How To Waste $100 Billion: Weapons That Didn’t Work Out One of the most unsettling facets of federal finance is the way the government devalues past investments. The political system is so focused on the next […]