“Open thread Nov. 18, 2022,” Angry Bear, angry bear blog.

(Dan here…lifted from One handed Economist by David Zetland’s Interesting Stuff)

Read: “…because of how people actually use Twitter, the lines between “comedy club” and “town square” and “room full of monetizable user data that drive advertising revenue” aren’t always apparent.” Related: “From being asked to review every product you buy to believing that every tweet or Instagram image warrants likes or comments or follows, social media produced a positively unhinged, sociopathic rendition of human sociality. That’s no surprise, I guess, given that the model was forged in the fires of Big Tech companies such as Facebook, where sociopathy is a design philosophy.“

This wasn’t supposed to be a website that hosts popularity contests where if you lose, you die.

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“Open thread Nov. 15, 2022,” Angry Bear, angry bear blog

“Open thread Nov. 8, 2022 Election Day,” Angry Bear, angry bear blog.

By Joseph Joyce

Making Friends in the New Global Order

U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen gave a talk at the Atlantic Council last April on the future role of cooperation in the global economy. In October Chrystia Freeland, Deputy Prime Minister of Canada and its Minister of Finance, gave an address at the Brookings Institution that presented a similar perspective on how the global economy must be reorganized to meet security demands. Their speeches raise questions about how the new arrangements would operate, and how the rest of the world would fit into the proposed framework.

Yellen declared that the war between Russia and Ukraine had “redrawn the contours of the world economic outlook…” The sanctions imposed by the U.S., the other

“Open thread November 4, 2022″ – Angry Bear, (angrybearblog.com).

“Open thread October 28, 2022,” – Angry Bear, angry bear blog

Tags: Open Thread November 1 2022

Lifted from notes from David Zetland’s news letter Interesting Stuff:

The sustainability challenge is not population as much as consumption. Me in 2009: “A sustainable economy is like a sustainable lifestyle: Minimize your consumption, put something away for a rainy day, and MAKE SURE that you are selling good quality at a good price.” NYT 2022: “By any standard, American lives have become excessive and indulgent, full of large homes, long trips, aisles of choices and app-delivered convenience. If the possibilities of the future are already narrowing to the one being painted by science with increasing lucidity, it strains even the most vivid imagination to picture it widening again without a change in behavior.“Climate chaos

This NYT article on

Open thread October 25, 2022 – Angry Bear (angrybearblog.com)

From the Economic Policy Institute comes this piece on who gets benefits:

The pandemic highlighted vast inequalities in the United States, especially in the U.S. labor market. Striking disparities were magnified in who could work from home and who had to go into work in person, who was able to keep their job and who suffered from lost work hours or employment altogether, who had health insurance to seek care when they needed it and who didn’t, and who had the ability to take paid sick days to stay home when sick, get vaccinated, or take care of loved ones and who did not. Yesterday, the latest data on employer benefits was released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Stark inequalities persist in access to workplace benefits. One that hits hard is

By Joseph Joyce (Capital Ebbs and Flows)

Has the Third Era of Globalization Ended?

Behind the headlines forecasting a global economic recession there is another narrative about the end of globalization. This reflects political tensions over trade, the impact of the pandemic on global supply chains and the shutdown of economic ties with Russia. But dating the beginning and end of the most recent era of the integration of global markets poses challenges.

All chronological assignments for the purpose of establishing historical eras are arbitrary. Did World War II begin in 1939 when Germany and the Soviet Union invaded Poland? Or in 1937 when Japan invaded China? When was the First Industrial Revolution succeeded by the Second Revolution? Mid or

Mike Konczal and Niko Lusiani at the Roosevelt Institute take a closer quantitative look at the sources of inflation the last two years:

This research brief is the first to explore the size and distribution of markups (essentially the difference between sales and marginal costs) and profit margins across 3,698 firms operating in the US in 2021, reproducing and updating the analysis of Jan De Loecker, Jan Eeckhout, and Gabriel Unger’s The Rise of Market Power and the Macroeconomic Implications. Konczal and Lusiani’s analysis is evidence that the recent sudden high jump in markups fits all three of the main explanatory stories of inflation being debated—namely those related to changes in demand, supply, and market power. Notably, they find that…
…
The

Dana Millbank at the Washington Post points us to JD Vance, the MAGA Republican from Ohio running for a Senate seat in Congress and a potential American Julius Caesar.

“‘Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears: They have come to resurrect Caesar.

MAGA Republican leaders take umbrage at being accused of ‘semi-fascism,‘ which is understandable: Twentieth-century dictators such as Mussolini and the German guy with the mustache gave fascism a bad name. But the MAGA crowd isn’t disavowing totalitarianism, per se. It’s just their taste in authoritarian figures skews toward the classics. They’re old-school — 1st century B.C. old.

‘Hail, Caesar’ goes down so much easier than ‘Heil Hitler.’”

J.D. Vance, the Republican Senate nominee in

Chandra Childers at Economic Policy Institute reports on household income:

“Household incomes have fallen since 2019 despite growth in workers’ earnings“

“On Thursday, the U.S. Census Bureau released 2021 household income and household earnings data for states from the American Community Survey (ACS). National averages hide the wide disparities experienced by workers and families across states while state-level data can help us understand how policy choices impact income and earnings.

According to the ACS, inflation-adjusted median household income in 2021 was $69,717 nationally with large differences across states. Nineteen states and the District of Columbia had median household incomes above the national average with the highest being

David Zetland writes on “replacement theory” (originally published at One Handed Economist)

Replacement theory in the US

“Replacement theory” is a semi-racist, often-hysterical belief that — in the US — White Christians will be “replaced” by others.

The racist part arises from the vapid conception of “race” and/or “White” which rests on no biological or scientific facts. As anyone can tell you, every country (or tribe or community) has its own ideas of race, purity, etc. (Here are some of my earlier thoughts on race.)

In the US, “race” discussions are dominated by its history of slavery, bigotry, migration and inequality, which means that “race” is often a code-word for some other issue that people would prefer not to address or solve,

Lifted from notes by One handed economist David Zetland comes with this reminder about US life expectancy dropping. David goes further and gives the reasons for decreasing Life Expectancy.

America, my increasingly ex-country, has lower life expectancy than 21 “peer” countries. This decline being due to a combination of death from Covid, cars, guns, and lifestyle.

The first fact about Covid was sadly unsurprising:

The coronavirus pandemic killed so many people that U.S. life expectancy fell from roughly 79 in 2019 to 76 in 2021—the largest two-year decline in nearly a century. The drop was sharpest among Native Americans and Alaska Natives, whose life expectancy fell to 65, close to the national average during World War II.

The second