Open thread March 17, 2023, Angry Bear (angrybearblog.com)

Tags: open thread

Katie Porter on Social Security. Can you spare a bit more than three minutes?

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Three of the many Republicans who are absolutely not for the People.

Social Security & the Debt Limit, Angry Bear, Bruce Webb.

Tags: debt, Katie Porter

Via Diane Ravitch’s blog comes this note and bio to watch Dr. Fenwick livestream presentation. I am pointing to her work as somebody worth a look.

Living with Histories That We Do Not Know with Leslie Fenwick

 Tuesday, April 11, 4 p.m. ET Dr. Fenwick will draw on her sustained contribution to education policy research and groundbreaking findings from her recently published award-winning and bestselling book, Jim Crow’s Pink Slip. Dr. Fenwick’s research upends what we know and understand about Brown vs. Board of Education and details why the newly excavated history she shares is important to the nation’s racial justice and educational equity goals. Livestreamed at www.wellesley.edu/live.

By Joseph Joyce

The IMF’s Position in a Fragmented Global Economy

Ten years ago Cambridge University Press published my book, The IMF and Global Financial crises: Phoenix Rising? I had written a series of journal papers on the IMF and used the format of a book to summarize what I had learned about the Fund. I also made some evaluations and projections about the IMF and its reputation; a decade later, how has the IMF done?

The book reviewed the history of the IMF from its founding at Bretton Woods through the global financial crisis. One of the theses of the book was that the IMF had paid a high price for its handling of the Asian financial crisis. The Fund had formulated programs for Indonesia, South Korea, and Thailand that proved to be

The NYT addresses the increasing use of child labor in the US (the link allows access to the article whether you have a subscription or not):

Arriving in record numbers, they’re ending up in dangerous jobs that violate child labor laws — including in factories that make products for well-known brands like Cheetos and Fruit of the Loom.

“It was almost midnight in Grand Rapids, Mich., but inside the factory everything was bright. A conveyor belt carried bags of Cheerios past a cluster of young workers. One was 15-year-old Carolina Yoc, who came to the United States on her own last year to live with a relative she had never met.

About every 10 seconds, she stuffed a sealed plastic bag of cereal into a passing yellow carton. It could be

This NYT story just dredges up the stories we would read and hear in the fifties and sixties. Popular song when I was hanging around the coffee houses then. No Starbucks then or laptops. If the song was of your ilk.

Arriving in record numbers, the children escaping other countries are ending up in jobs violating child labor laws. Their presence can be found in the factories making the products your own and safe children might be eating or wearing. Well-known brands such as like Cheetos, Cheerios, Fruit of the Loom may be packaged or made by children as young as your own.

Surprisingly, their presence in manufacturing environments is not just confined to places such as Alabama, Florida, and Georgia. Places where a northerner might expect to run

Open Thread March 3, 2023, Angry Bear, angrybearblog.com

Tags: open thread

By David Zetland (originally published at The one-handed economist)

Don’t take water for granted

In his 1987 hit, “Diamonds on the soul of her shoes“, Paul Simon sings:

She said, “You’ve taken me for grantedBecause I please youWearing these diamonds”

This lyric, although a bit paradoxical, has always resonated with me, and I’ve applied it in many “taking-for-granted” situations.

One of them concerns clean water, which most of us have certainly taken for granted, and in a way that is naive (to people who do not have access to affordable, clean water) as well as dangerous (the value of water in our lives is so high — relative to its price — that we do not think of the disastrous consequences of losing access to that water).

Well, it’s

F.D.R.’s statement on signing the Social Security Act reminds us to pay attention to ‘reform’ or schemes to ‘privatize’

PRESIDENTIAL STATEMENT SIGNING THE SOCIAL SECURITY ACT. AUGUST 14,1935

Today a hope of many years’ standing is in large part fulfilled. The civilization of the past hundred years, with its startling industrial changes, has tended more and more to make life insecure. Young people have come to wonder what would be their lot when they came to old age. The man with a job has wondered how long the job would last.

This social security measure gives at least some protection to thirty millions of our citizens who will reap direct benefits through unemployment compensation, through old-age pensions and through increased services

By David Zetland (originally published at The one-handed economist)

Climate loss, grief and migration

The climate we grew up with is leaving. International action to slow climate chaos is not really working. National action and market innovations are having some useful impacts, but they are far too few on the mitigation side and far too weak on the adaptation side. We are going to face consequences with weak defenses.

When I moved to Amsterdam in 2010, I joked that it was going to get “California weather” due to climate change. 

Now, California is turning from heaven to hell, in terms of drought, floods and fire.

2022 was Amsterdam’s warmest year on record (since 1951) and the country’s second warmest year since 1901. The 2022 drought

Open thread February 18, 2023, Angry Bear, (angrybearblog.com)

Tags: open thread

From the New York Times, Ezra Klein’s opinion piece, The Story Construction Tells About America’s Economy Is Disturbing

Here’s something odd:

We’re getting worse at construction. Think of the technology we have today that we didn’t in the 1970s. The new generations of power tools and computer modeling and teleconferencing and advanced machinery and prefab materials and global shipping. You’d think we could build much more, much faster, for less money, than in the past. But we can’t. Or, at least, we don’t.

Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, productivity in the construction sector — how much more could be done given the same number of workers and machines and land — grew faster than productivity in the rest of the economy. Then, around 1970,

Open thread Jan. 25, 2023, Angry Bear, angrybearblog.com

By David Zetland (originally published at The one handed economist)

The iceberg of identity

How do you describe yourself to others?

Me?

I am a white American 53-year old male, of average height and weight, mostly white hair (a touch of pepper), green-blue eyes, and a decent tan.

That description is perhaps 90 percent of my outside appearance, but 10 percent of my interior spirit, mind and soul.

I’ve eaten out of dumpsters (for 2 years), gone from fundamentalist Christian to agnostic, spoken bits and pieces of six languages, traveled in many places, dated many women (and married one), gone from wanting five kids to zero, gone from anorexic (114 pounds/52 kg) to normal weight as a vegan, gone from vintage British convertibles to

Open thread Jan. 17, 2022 – Angry Bear, angry bear blog

From the NYT opinion pages comes Paul Krugman’s description of the two basic problems of a declining population in a country, Dr. Krugman ues China as an example.

China’s population declined last year, for the first time since the mass deaths associated with Mao Zedong’s disastrous Great Leap Forward in the 1960s. Or maybe it would be more accurate to say that China has announced that its population declined. Many observers are skeptical about Chinese data. I’ve been at conferences when China released, say, new data on economic growth, and many people responded by asking not “Why was growth 7.3 per cent?” but rather “Why did the Chinese government decide to say that it was 7.3 per cent?”

In any case, it’s clear that China’s population is or

“Open Thread January 6, 2023,” Angry Bear, angry bear blog

By David Zetland (originally published at The one handed economist)

I had heard of Douglass, but man oh man, I had no idea of his brilliance.

His “Composite Nation” speech is full of wisdom and hope, offering a path to that “shining city on a hill” that Americans have had such a hard time reaching — mostly due to a desire to preserve “tradition” over “progress.”

(Listen to this Malcolm Gladwell episode on a segregationist in the 1970s — a man who has many imitators, led by T***p, in today’s America.)

Here are some excerpts that deserve your attention:

“We have for along time hesitated to adopt and may yet refuse to adopt, and carry out, the only principle which can solve that difficulty and give peace, strength and security to the

Open thread Dec. 30, 2022, Angry Bear, angry bear blog

Tags: open thread

“This Pioneering Economist Says Our Obsession With Growth Must End,” NYT. Portions are (or much) taken from David Marchese’s interview with Herman Daly in 2022. Economist Herman Daly passed on, October 28 in Richmond, Virginia. at the age of 84.

What made Herman Daly unique was his embracing of “the counterintuitive possibility our current pursuit of growth, rabid as it is causing such great ecological harm. In turn, the pursuit might be incurring more costs than gains. ” 

AB: I altered the Daly statement slightly to impose a statement rather than the question Economist Daly poses. Other’s opinion may differ.

Daly posits the prioritization of growth ultimately being a losing game. A position the economist Herman Daly has been exploring for

Open thread Dec. 27, 2022, Angry Bear, angry bear blog.

Tags: open thread

By Joseph Joyce

The 2022 Globie: Money and Empire

Every year we name a book the “Globalization Book of the Year” (aka the “Globie”). The prize is (alas!) strictly honorific and does not come with a monetary award. But announcing the award gives me a chance to draw attention to a recent book—or books—that are particularly insightful about globalization. Previous winners are listed at the bottom of the column (also see here and here).

This year’s recipient is Money and Empire: Charles P. Kindleberger and the Dollar System by Perry Mehrling, Professor of International Political Economy at the Pardee School of Global Studies of Boston University. The book is an intellectual biography of Charles Kindleberger, who came to MIT in 1948 after having

Open thread Dec. 23, 2022, Angry Bear, angry bear blog

Tags: open thread

From the New York Times comes this list of trends in real estate, houses, mortgages, and the impact on buyers and sellers.

The State of Real Estate

Whether you’re renting, buying or selling, here’s a look at real estate trends.

Rising mortgage rates. Faltering home sales. Skyrocketing rents. We spoke with economists, mortgage brokers and real estate agents to plot the course ahead.

Looking for a house in this tight market? Consider an octagon.

Hybrid work, layoffs and higher interest rates are leaving lots of office space vacant and hurting the commercial real estate business.

American home buyers are older, whiter and wealthier than at any time in recent memory, while discrimination is holding Black buyers back in all steps of

From Dan and Bill, and contributors to all our readers.

From the Washington Post comes this map of temperatures over much of North America, a result of the artic blast and winter storm begun today, Thursday. In the Boston area rain is expected. The temperature tonight actually is rising from from about 43 degrees F. to the low 50’s F. , to continue throughout Friday, and then eventually falls to 12 degrees F. by Saturday morning. How is your weather?

Tags: weather