Flying blind The government shutdown is affecting some important economic indicators. All of the series published by the Census Bureau, including retail sales, manufacturers’ and wholesalers’ data, personal income and spending, new home sales and housing permits and starts, are not being published. It appears that GDP is not going to be published by the […]
The Key to Gentrification In the world of urban politics, there is probably no more potent populist rallying cry than the demand to halt gentrification. Activists have fought it on multiple fronts: zoning, development subsidies, permitting, rent control—every lever housing policies afford. But what if they’re mistaking cause for effect, hacking away at the visible […]
Value of the Chrysler Building and California Property Taxes The big news in New York City is that the Chrysler Building is for sale: New York City’s iconic Chrysler Building has appeared in dozens of movies and remained an Art Deco jewel of the Manhattan skyline for decades. Now, the 89-year-old skyscraper can be yours. Located on […]
A National Emergency Believe It or Not Version, The Hill, Republican Congressional Representative Andy Bigg It is hard to believe someone would write this stuff with any degree of being serious. This is why it should be reprinted as this Representative is an idiot. “In this time of stasis in Congress and a national security […]
In a clinical trial the therapy is decided by a pseudo random number generator. How can this be ethical ? People are treated differently for no reason related to different interests different values and priorities or even different merit (assuming merit can differ). There is a utilitarian rational for clinical trials. Through such trials doctors […]
Slavery in the US An issue so far not openly addressed in this “Partial Shutdown” situation is that those who have been deemed to be “essential,” are now working without pay, even though we all believe that they will eventually receive their overdue backpay. I really do not know the law that says that these […]
by New Deal democrat Weekly Indicators for January 6 – 10 at Seeking Alpha My Weekly Indicators post is up at Seeking Alpha. Recent gyrations have changed both the short and long term forecast. Once again, it shows that the biggest problem is that most forecasters simply project existing trends forward. As usual, reading the article […]
Solid social science on the opinion pages (needless to say news reporters consider interest in randomized controlled experiments to be opinion. Christian Caryl explains how it is possible to determine the effect of the Russian influence campaign on the 2016 presidential election. Sinan Aral, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology [skip] says he […]