In his newly published Limits: Why Malthus Was Wrong and Why Environmentalists Should Care, Giorgos Kallis challenges what has become the conventional perversion of Robert Malthus’s economic argument. Far from being a “prophet of doom” predicting the inevitable overshoot by population growth of food supplies, Malthus was an advocate of industrial progress as the antidote to […]
Not doomed yet v.2.0: beware recession porn Way back when I first started writing online almost 15 years ago, my very first post on Daily Kos was a little note called “Not Doomed Yet.” It was pretty pathetic compared with the standards of my writing since the Great Recession, but the point of it was, back in […]
Record Income Taxes? I should read more posts from Kevin Drum: The Yahoo News reporter comes close to explaining what happened by noting that there were more returns in 2018 than 2017. As you might guess, this happens every year as the US population increases. So let’s take a look at personal income tax receipts adjusted […]
by New Deal democrat Why the revised Q2 GDP report next week may be the most important release in 10 years Last Thursday there were major backward revisions to unit labor costs. Since corporate profits deflated by unit labor costs are a long leading indicator, this had a big negative effect on the forecast for […]
Cheerleading for Austerity Not content to follow a news strategy that maximizes Trump’s prospects for re-election, the New York Times leads today with a story that combines economic illiteracy and reactionary scaremongering in a preview of what we’re likely to see in the 2020 presidential race. “Budget Deficit Is Set to Surge Past $1 Trillion” screams the headline, […]
I’ll just post this link and let it speak for itself. Truckers voted for Trump in droves. Now they say his trade war is ‘killing’ their ability to make a living. Its starts wtih: Morris Coffman has been a truck driver for 35 years. And he’s been a conservative for even longer than that — […]
“Tougher On Trade Than Trump”? This is how the NY Times has presented things day before yesterday, apparently lamenting that the Dem candidates are going to have a tough time presenting themselves as “tougher on trade than Trump.” This somehow presumes that this is what they must do to win the election, and at least […]
It is standard analysis to see real and nominal imports as a share of GDP quoted to estimate the importance of imports in the economy. Currently that shows nominal imports are about 15% of GDP and real imports are some 18% of real GDP. But I suspect that this comparison understates the role of imports […]