The Rise and Fall of the Roman Republic: part 4 of 4: the Empire as hegemonic “Banana Republic” ruled by caudillos As we have seen, the Roman Republic was brought down by an escalating series of acts of political violence, from murders to organized political mobs, to private legions, to four military marches over a […]
The Famous Baseball-Watching Equality-Equity Graphic, Scrutinized Here’s the graphic, widely used to explain why equity outcomes require unequal treatment of different people. Benjamin Studebaker (hat tip Naked Capitalism) doesn’t like it at all: “I hate it so much.” But his complaints, about the way the graphic elides classic debates in political theory, strike me as being […]
September existing home sales: a pause in the housing rebound I normally don’t bother with existing home sales, since it is the least economically important of housing data, but it’s a really slow news week, so … September existing home sales were reported at 5.38 million annualized by the NAR. While that is a decline […]
Whither Lebanon? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I should probably write about the “big success” we have in Northeastern Syria thanks to Vladimir Putin talking the Turkish president, Erdogan, into holding back some from his nation’s invasion of Kurdish territory. But, heck, it is still hard to know what is going on there. So instead I am […]
EMichael: The Repubs have a difficult time blocking national and state wide elections for Pres and Senators in Michigan. It is only when they pack a district or parcel a majority into several districts are they able to achieve a win in places where a fair election will contest who does win. In any case, […]
by New Deal democrat The divergent nowcast and one model’s forecast at Seeking Alpha Over 10 years ago I found a good, quick-and-dirty way of looking at the Index of Leading Indicators. It only matters at turning points, which means, for the first time since the 2015-16 “shallow industrial recession,” it’s worth looking at now. […]
The Rise and Fall of the Roman Republic: part 3 of 4: the final hammer-blows “The Republic is nothing, a mere name without body or form.” – Julius Caesar This is part 3 of my four part look at why the Roman Republic, which was successful and stable for nearly 4 centuries, ultimately fell into tyranny. […]
The Rise and Fall of the Roman Republic: part 2 of 4: the first hammer-blows This is part 2 of my four part look at the Roman Republic and subsequent Empire. In part 1, I described the structure of the Republic, and its several centuries of stability and success, as well as the underlying causes […]