The Angry Bear

New jobless claims: a surprise to the positive side I have been paying particular attention to new jobless claims this year, as being the most important weekly economic datapoint to correlate with vaccination progress. My ultimate target for claims is an average of 325,000 or below, which would signify a return to normal expansion levels in the past 30 years. Lasts week I wrote that “Unfortunately, that progress [in vaccinations] has largely...

Karl Marx did not use the phrase, socially necessary labour time (or its equivalent, labour time [that is] socially necessary) in the Grundrisse (1857-58 notebooks). He did, however, refer once to “the necessary labour of society”: As soon as labour in the direct form has ceased to be the great well-spring of wealth, labour time ceases and must cease to be its measure, and hence exchange value [must cease to be the measure] of use value. The...

PhD geneticist and molecular biologist Joel Eissenberg discussing CRISPR results. — “A watershed moment in modern medicine,” says genetics expert The promise of gene therapy may finally be realized. I’ve been a PhD geneticist and molecular biologist for nearly 40 years. During that time, I’ve seen the cloning of many human genes for which inherited diseases were known (e.g., cystic fibrosis, Huntingtons, Duchenne/Becker muscular dystrophy)....

Coronavirus dashboard for June 30: 2 to 4 weeks until a likely major “Delta” outbreak in unvaccinated regions Missouri has been the US bellwether for the onset of the “Delta” variant of COVID. This makes the below graph by Charles Gaba of infection rates by county for June in Missouri particularly insightful: As has been usual, partisanship, which has correlated highly with vaccinations, in turn also has a strong relationship with the...

CMS bans Surprise Billing The issues here were medical services practitioners not being on hospital staff. Practitioners not subject to hospital billing practices and bargaining contracts with Healthcare insurance were billing at their rates to recover what they deem to be reasonable. In the end, the patient pays whatever can be worked out. Radiology and Anesthesiology are two of the practices which come to mind. _________ The Biden...

In a comment on my earlier post, Bill H. (run75441) mentioned that he thought at first this series on socially necessary labour time (SNLT) would be about Sydney Chapman’s theory. That comment stopped me short because I hadn’t thought about the connection between Marx’s analysis of SNLT and Chapman’s theory of hours. Recall that Chapman argued that competitive pressures would lead employers to prefer hours of work that were longer than optimal for...

“A Review of “The American War in Afghanistan,” Carter Malkasian, Foreign Affairs In 2008, I interviewed the United Kingdom’s then outgoing military commander in Afghanistan, Brigadier Mark Carleton-Smith, in a dusty firebase in Helmand Province, where international troops had been battling the Taliban on a daily basis for territory that kept slipping away. Carleton-Smith stated the war in Afghanistan could not be won militarily. He was the first...

RIP Steve Horwitz Steven G. Horwitz died the day before yesterday of lymphoma at age 57.  Probably most reading this do not know who he was, but he was somebody I knew quite well, even as I disagreed with him quite a lot about economics. He was arguably the leading monetary economist out of the group of neo-Austrian economists who came out of George Mason University and who have been closely linked to Peter Boettke who is there, arguably the...

Gen. Mark Milley responds to Rep. Matt Gaetz on Extremism & Critical Race Theory: "I personally find it offensive that we are accusing the United States military, our general officers, our commissioned, non-commissioned officers of being 'woke' or something else." pic.twitter.com/P1x6vg9FUr— CSPAN (@cspan) June 23, 2021General Milley during the hearing: “I’ve read Mao Zedong. I’ve read Karl Marx. I’ve read Lenin. That doesn’t make me a...