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

Other blogs than econ

Clinical Psychology and Psychiatry: A Closer Look carries articles of interest in the mental health field that are directly related to things we talk about at Angry Bear. Save the Rustbelt had a few links he has suggested as well…maybe we can make a referral list of interest. Tech Dirt went bonkers over cactus’s post […]

First lesson in econ for kids….scarcity

Wikipedia says: In economics, scarcity is the problem of infinite human needs and wants, in a world of finite resources. In other words, society does not have sufficient productive resources to fulfill those wants and needs. Alternatively, scarcity implies that not all of society’s goals can be pursued at the same time; trade-offs are made […]

Soc Sec XXXIV: Open Thread/Assignment Desk

Well open threads are good enough for Kos and Duncan and both Matt and Ezra have opened up Assignment Desk threads so I might as well jump on the bandwagon. I just got finished updating my index for this series at More Social Security Posts from Angry Bear and see that XXXIII was exactly a […]

Cuba’s reforms

One Salient Oversight sends this thought on gung-ho idealogists: From the department of not a communist country: Cuba is to put more state-controlled farm land into private hands, in a move to increase the island’s lagging food production. Private farmers who do well will be able to increase their holdings by up to 99 acres […]

Smart Health Care Cost sharing

Ezra Klein writes about smart cost sharing. He wants a committee to decide reimbursement rates. This made me think about an idea I got from Mark Thoma Mark Thoma linked to the even more verbose version of this at my other blog. He has an interesting comment thread. …preventative care … ought to be encouraged, […]

Auto Prices and the CPI

Earlier today in discussing auto prices I’m afraid I did not explain myself very well.Let me use actual data and see if I can do better. Because the CPI is quality adjusted what it is showing is the price of buying an earlier model car, if you could. In the chart above I set the […]

All in the phrasing

The phrasing of these projections read just like Social Security crisis projections. I hope some of our friends see the irony of such claims about Social Security if they dislike these statements. The CBO has released a report detailing the effects of indexing the the AMT to inflation (i.e. “patching” it so that fewer households […]

What economics would you teach kids?

by jsalvati What economics would you teach kids? Rdan points to a ‘National Budget Simulation’ program that is apparently part of Massachusetts economics education for grades 4-12. I was surprised when I clicked on the link because the federal budget seems like a really strange place to start economics education. It seems important to start […]

Brad DeLong asks about the top ten econ blogs by net news wire

Brad DeLong asks: Here’s what NetNewsWire throws up as tops in attention in the “economics” category: Mark Thoma’s Economist’s View http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/ Alex Tabarrok and Tyler Cowen’s Marginal Revolution http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/ Justin Fox’s Curious Capitalist http://time-blog.com/curious_capitalist/ Barry Ritholtz’s The Big Picture http://bigpicture.typepad.com/comments/ James Hamilton’s and Menzie Chinn’s Econbrowser http://www.econbrowser.com/ Angry Bear http://angrybear.blogspot.com/ WSJ Real Time Economics http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/ […]

Unobserved Country Heterogeneity: GDP Levels or Growth Rates

Have you ever noticed that, when considering the economic performance of different countries, people often just report the GDP growth rate without any corrections for e.g. initial GDP ? It’s as if they thought that countries generally have about the same growth rate and any deviation from the world average is interesting. This is very […]