The Angry Bear

Matt Yglesias has a good piece up explaining why “opening” the economy now won’t save the economy.  The reason is that people will continue to avoid contact with others until the epidemic is brought under control.  Simply allowing restaurants, theaters, and workplaces to open will not change this basic fact.  Indeed, airlines are still open for business, but the demand for air travel has nosedived as people (understandably) avoid being sealed in a poorly...

Trends in US States compared by coronavirus response I mentioned over the weekend that I wanted to break out and look at some different aspects of the coronavirus pandemic. Here’s the first: how are States at different ends of the restrictions and testing spectrums faring? Seven States have never even mandated lockdowns. Let’s look at these, alphabetically: Arkansas: Iowa: Figure 1 Nebraska: North Dakota South Dakota: Utah: Wyoming: Four of the seven...

Does Google’s Search Algorithm Protect the New York Times? Yesterday morning, after reading the Sunday New York Times, I posted two pieces on EconoSpeak within a few minutes of each other.  One was a short, cute little item (a visual grab from the paper) entitled “The Art of Juxtaposition”; the other was a longer, more substantial takedown of a deficit hysteria “analysis” I called “The Usual Deficit Blather from the New York Times”. As usual, I...

Advocates of quickly ending the shutdowns are in the news. Mostly, because one of them is President. Like most Americans, I think reopening soon would be a mistake (and remember I am in Italy where the shut down is severe compared to any State in the USA). I’m just going to assume that reopening by May 1 is a bad idea and try to understand who advocates it and why they do. First the vast majority of Americans do not support reopening soon. There was the...

Towards a modern “History of Republics”: a consideration of William Everdell’s “The End of Kings: A History of Republics and Republicans” In view of the horrific damage that the Trump Administration has done to the American Republic, during the past year I have done extensive reading of the histories of a number of the most successful or durable Republics over time. The reason has been to try to answer the question of whether there is an overarching...

The Art of Juxtaposition Seen in today’s New York Times in Print:

Oil prices are collapsing as West Texas intermediate is now trading at just over $11/bbl Oil prices move to the point where the marginal supply is profitable or unprofitable. In today’s world the marginal oil supply is US fracked oil. But the economics of fracked oil differs from traditional oil in that the current cost of production is very high as compared to most traditional sources where current costs are relative insignificant and the bulk of the...

Coronavirus dashboard for April 20: a few positive development Here is the update through yesterday (April 19) As usual, significant developments are in italics. Yesterday saw the biggest number of daily tests, and ratio of total vs. positive tests so far, both positive developments.  The number and rate of daily infections and deaths also declined, but that may be a function of lower weekend reporting. Here are yesterday’s numbers. Number and rate of...

The Usual Deficit Blather from the New York Times The Times today ran a truly execrable article warning us that, once the virus has passed, we will suffer dire consequences from the runup of government debt.  As most readers know, this argument is theoretically illiterate, derived from the false comparison between household and government debt.  We’ve been through this many times before, and I have nothing to add. I do want to focus on one sentence,...