The Angry Bear

Might We Be On The Verge Of An “Upswing”? One of the more dramatic sessions at the just-completed ASSA meetings in San Diego was an AEA panel on “Deaths from Despair and the Future of Capitalism” on Saturday at 2:30.  Chaired by Angus Deaton, it focused on the book by him and his wife/coauthor Anne Case with the same title as the panel session.  Case spoke on their book.  This was followed by Robert Putnam, who spoke on his forthcoming (in about six...

 State Capacity and Liberalism Tyler Cowen has a post up on State Capacity Libertarianism.  I’m not so interested in the “libertarian” part of his argument, which is mostly aimed at persuading libertarians to accept some role for government beyond enforcing contracts and protecting property rights.  But liberals (as in progressives) have good reason to think hard about state capacity.  A few thoughts on liberalism and state capacity: Recognition of...

by New Deal democrat Weekly Indicators for December 30 – January 3 at Seeking Alpha  My Weekly Indicators post is up at Seeking Alpha. There were marginal moves to the downside on both the producer and consumer sides of the ledger this past week. As usual, clicking over and reading rewards me with just a little bit of $$$ for my efforts.

As reported by Market Watch and Axios, drug prices are on the rise the beginning of 2020. The increases exceed the 2% inflation the nation has been incurring and the 3.4% growth in wages recently incurred by nonsupervisory labor. According to Market Watch, overall drug pricing will rise 5.8% at the start of 2020 due to price increases. This is about the same as Medical CPI. Fortune Magazine; “The price hikes are almost all below 10%, with the median price...

Different  bloggers  have been posting their favorite charts of 2019 this January.  So I decided to post my favorite chart of the past 20, or more, “years of the long bond yield versus the long run trend.”  Bond yields are now below their long run trend and may be at or near a secular bottom.  Of course no one rings a bell at the turning point so we probably will only identify the bottom long  after it actually occurs....

Republics and the war-making power In view of the militry carrying out Trump’s order to kill an Iranian general, I thought I would weigh in on the issue of the war-making power historically by republics. I don’t have much to add to the substance of the immediate debate. Killing an Iranian general was certainly an act of war. It was also a big escalation on the US side. At the same time, the US’s economic blockade of Iran, which it has been attempting to...

Is The Chinese Economic System the “Mandarin Growth Model” or the “Chinese-Style Keiretsu System”? The first term in this choice was the title of a paper presented this morning (1/4/20) at the ACES/ASSA session at 8 AM in San Diego by Wei Xiong of Princeton University.  It was a highly mathematical model I shall describe shortly, but which drew heavily on the paper presented before it by Chenggan Xu of Cheng Kong Graduate School of Business in Beijing,...

Killing Abu Mahdi Al-Muhandis Most of the attention in this recent attack by a US drone at the Baghdad Airport has been on it killing Iranian Quds Force commander, Qasim (Qassem) Solmaini (Suleimani), supposedly plotting an “imminent” attack on Americans as he flew a commercial airliner to Iraq at the invitation of its government and passed through passport control.  But much less attention has been paid to the killing in that attack of Abu Mahdi...

Of the 16.7 million uninsured people who could be shopping on the Marketplace whether or not they are eligible for a subsidy; a Kaiser Family Foundation analysis estimates 4.7 million of the uninsured Americans are eligible for free ($0 premiums) Bronze plans in the ACA marketplace. The 4.7 million is also a bit less than half of the uninsured who are eligible for marketplace subsidies, according to a 2017 Kaiser estimate. Bronze plans have an average...