Nancy Folbre is an economics professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Her post in the NYT Economix begins: The Occupy Wall Street movement, displaced from some key geographic locations, now enjoys a small but significant encampment among economists. Concerns about the impact of growing economic inequality fit neatly into a larger critique of mainstream […]

And not in a good way, when he says: I understand that Republicans are just playing the culture war game here, trying to link Warren and the loony left. I don’t know how that will play in, er, Massachusetts. And the world has moved on from the Hard Hat riots and the 1972 campaign. The […]

Noted for the record: author Piaw Na reviews Mike Kimel‘s Presimetrics at Piaw’s Blog: This is a great book to read if you’ve got a statistical bent and are willing to follow the data rather than your pre-conceived notions….Many people like to say that they’re data-driven, but most people actually have prejudices that lead them […]

As part of my continuing series of Analogies that Should Be on the SAT, this is what Famous Entrepreneurs do (h/t Brad DeLong): In the IBM PC era, Steve drove innovation forward with the Macintosh. This, like the Apple II, was squarely aimed at expanding the use of PCs to everyone, the “computer for the […]

The lead article in the current AER is available here (gated, apparently, though the link isn’t working; h/t Tom Bozzo [on FB] and Brad DeLong; I was using the paper copy). The most interesting part so far: the authors only considered the documented costs of air pollution—not land, not water—in deriving the (embarrassingly negative) ROI […]

I was going to write something about Reed Hastings’s inane email, but Wired covered the main point, even if they did bury the lede: However, it’s impossible to see how the split itself benefits customers. The price and plan changes that flustered many of them months ago remain in place, but the company now directs […]

by Mike Kimel Can someone explain to me why people volunteer at for-profit hospitals? I can understand volunteering at a not-for-profit hospital, but how is volunteering at a for-profit hospital different from, say, volunteering at Exxon-Mobil or Wal-Mart?

by Mike Kimel Most economists believe that unemployment benefits increase the unemployment rate. The idea is that even having a relatively small income coming in (from unemployment) can encourage people to stay jobless just a little while longer. And no doubt there are people who play the unemployment compensation game fairly well. Now, consider severance […]

The bad news of the day is that about $5B ($5,000,000,000) more than previously believed went to buy goods made in China, Japan, non-major South and Central American countries, and other places outside the U.S. Per the Vampire Squid (tm Matt Taibbi), this should cause a revision to Q2 US GDP from 1.3% to 0.9%. […]

Brad DeLong asks why it hasn’t been done, if it hasn’t been done.  The biggest problem I can see is that you don’t know how insane the participants are—and that will have a major effect on how much damage is done when. Don’t get me wrong; the damage is already being done; it has been […]