Some readers resented The Washington Post for publishing an Associated Press photograph of a critically wounded Iraqi child being lifted from the rubble of his home in Baghdad’s Sadr City “after a U.S. airstrike.” Two-year-old Ali Hussein later died in a hospital. As the saying goes, the picture was worth a thousand words because it […]

A blast from the past. The first Report I downloaded was the 1997. It didn’t report on Productivity, instead the lead number was Real GDP. So we will run with that. What were the numbers under Intermediate Cost?:1997: 2.5%1998-2006 2.0%2010 1.8%2020 1.3%Hecuva job! A median prediction of a permanent 48% slowdown in growth rate by […]

The Dailey New Transcript reports: Dedham Town administrator William Keegan says a $120,000 settlement Dedham will receive from Swiss bank UBS for an investment that failed will cover the town’s costs in that deal, but no more. Nineteen Massachusetts municipal governments and public agencies will recover more than $35 million from UBS in the settlement […]

Is he talking CPI substitution and quality of goods, or just the difference in work ethic, or elimination of jobs by technology? Or is this BW explaining the intricacy of modern economic forcasting with Social Security? Or a Vermont economist passing down wisdom?

All the discussion about a holiday from the federal tax on gasoline this summer has brought all kinds of comments out of the woodwork about how government interference in markets, and especially the 1970s oil price controls and windfall profit tax prevented private companies from investing. Such comments seem to start out with some sort […]

For today let’s have less meta and more data. The key economic and demographic tables are V.A1 ‘Principal Demographic Assumptions’, V.B1 ‘Principal Economic Assumptions’ and V.B2 ‘Additional Economic Factors’ all of which are available in the 2008 Social Security Report’s List of Tables as are the tables showing numeric outcomes in both inflation adjusted Constant […]

Since I’m trying to cut a 24-page paper down closer to 15 today, I’ll leave the Heavy Lifting to other. But two things probably should be discussed (or at least noted) here: Brad DeLong appears (to me) to confuse perceiving a move from Democratic Republic to Empire—and therefore away from any Competitive Advantage for the […]

Is this about devaluation and inflation of the US dollar? Or is it about gas prices and robbers? Or just commodities as the new medium of exchange (slosh is the technical term I believe) of value? As if life is not hard enough to interpret. Update: Just a little bit of rhetorical fluff on my […]

The BBC reports: Baghdad – The authorities in Baghdad say they are preparing for an exodus of thousands of people from eastern parts of the city. Fighting between government and US troops on one side, and Shia militia on the other, has intensified recently. Two football stadiums are on stand-by to receive residents from two […]