The Angry Bear

The Afghanistan War (posted by run75441) The Washington Post has over the last 7 days published a detailed account based on many secret documents they have spent years obtaining to provide an accurate account of what has happened during what is now the longest war the US has been engaged in. It is an impressive account, which I have tried to follow, although with finishing a semester I did not read every word of it. But it is a serious and important...

The oncoming generational UK and US political tsunamis No big economic news today, so let me put up a couple of striking charts about the UK election last week. First, the change in party results in 2019 (left) vs. 2017 (right) in millions: Tories:   13.9. 13.6 Labour: 10.3. 12.9 (a 20% decline!) Lib Dems: 3.7  2.4 SNP:        1.2  1.0 Total turnout was down 1.5%. As should be obvious, as the accompanying commentary said, the Tories didn’t win; Labour...

Noah Smith’s The End of Econ Blogging’s Golden Age, Bloomberg Opinion. December 17, 2019. “If someone asked you to name the greatest economics blogger of all time, you might name Paul Krugman, or my Bloomberg Opinion colleague Tyler Cowen. But there’s a third name that deserves to be on that short list: Mark Thoma, an economics professor at the University of Oregon. On Friday, Thoma announced a well-deserved retirement. But the changes his blog made in...

Being an economist can be frustrating.  Most people do not understand how markets work, and economists spend a good deal of time arguing against bad policy ideas that appeal to non-economists, and for good ideas that do not appeal to common-sense.  This can sometimes feel like pushing rocks uphill.  Plus it can lead people to suspect that you are carrying water for the corporate rich, which is unpleasant. But what is it like to be an extreme right-wing...

Live-blogging the Fifteenth Amendment: December 17, 1868 In the Senate, Senators Dixon and Ferry, both Republicans from Connecticut, continued the debate from several days prior concerning a federal imposition of African-American voting rights on the States: Dixon: [M]y colleague … proposes to amend the Constitution of the United States in a manner which to me is very revolting, not because I hate negro suffrage, but, sir, I do desire that the proud old...

by David Zetland (originally published at One-handed Economist) Review: Secondhand I read this 2019 book at record speed due to its breezy (“magazine”) tone and discussion of one of my favorite passions: reusing old stuff. A few years ago Adam Minter wrote Junkyard Planet about the trash trade, but many readers told him about how they reused stuff rather than about their trash. Their passion led to this book (subtitle: Travels in the New Global Garage...

Amazing . . . President Trump’s Letter to the Speaker of the House Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi The first clue that much of the six pages of this letter was not written by Mr. Trump is the salutation; “Dear Madam Speaker.” Then it goes through a series of rants. You can catch a version on Politico also.

Initial claims turn neutral on seasonality, but no red flag As you know, I’ve been monitoring initial jobless claims closely for the past several months, to see if there are any signs of a slowdown turning into something worse. Simply put, if businesses aren’t laying employees off, those same people are consumers who are going to continue to spend, which is 70% of the total economy. So the lack of any such increase has been the best argument that no...