The Angry Bear

For party voting preference, which is more important, age or education? Looks like we have an answer For all the slicing and dicing that has been done in voting metrics for 2016 and 2018, one quandary has stood out. We know that higher educational attainment has strongly correlated with voting for Democrats, and we also know that there was a stark age difference in votes between Clinton and Trump in 2016: a majority of voters younger than 45 voted for...

Juan Cole at Informed Comment has a post up by Will de Freitas Should we cover the Sahara Desert with Solar Panels to Fight Climate Disaster? A map of North Africa is shown, with a surprisingly small box somewhere in Libya or Algeria shaded in. An area of the Sahara this size, the caption will say, could power the entire world through solar energy. Over the years various different schemes have been proposed for making this idea a reality. Though a...

“Opioid Overdose Now Provides 1 in 6 Donor Hearts,” Ashley Lyles, MedPage Today Overdose-death donors have accounted for a rapidly growing proportion of cardiac allografts, with a 14-fold increase from about 1% in 2000 to now 16.9%, “consistent with the rising opioid epidemic,” reported Nader Moazami, MD, of New York University Langone Health in New York City, and colleagues in The Annals of Thoracic Surgery. Earlier findings: A total of 1,710 of 15,904...

May jobs report: this is the kind of report you see at negative inflection points HEADLINES: +75,000 jobs added U3 unemployment rate unchanged at 3.6% U6 underemployment rate declined -0.2% from 7.3% to 7.1% (new expansion low) Leading employment indicators of a slowdown or recession   I am highlighting these because many leading indicators overall strongly suggest that an employment slowdown is coming. The following more leading numbers in the report...

CORE and Periphery in the Reform of Econ 101 Thanks to Greg Mankiw, I’ve seen a preview of the piece by Sam Bowles and Wendy Carlin that will be published in a forthcoming Journal of Economic Literature.  It’s apparently part of a roundtable on the teaching of introductory economics, and not surprisingly Bowles and Carlin focus on the freely downloadable CORE text produced with support from the Institute for New Economic Thinking.  The starting point of...

A Bernie Sanders Narrative for Seniors What follows is some unsolicited advice for the Sanders campaign. Politico has an important piece on the downside of the extraordinary age bias in Sanders’ support.  Like a teeter totter, the large advantage Sanders enjoys among younger voters is counterbalanced by his dismal showing among the older crowd.  The article reviews voting breakdowns from the 2016 campaign and current poll results, and it shows that...

75 Years After The Longest Day Yes, I am watching “The Longest Day” on TMC.  Have not seen it for decades, but this 75th anniversary of D-Day seems to be the time to do it.  This will be a rambling post all over the place.  I note that according to the film, it was German Field Marshall Rommel who is depicted calling it “the longest day,” the day before it happened, seeing it coming. I have been there several times, first in Fall 1953 when I was young...

A Very Erroneous Chart in the Economic Report of the President Menzie Chinn has been reading the latest Economic Report of the President and finds a very erroneous and misleading chart, which is figure 1-6 from this this document (see page 45), which states: Equipment investment, in particular, exhibited a pronounced spike in the fourth quarter of 2017, as both the House and Senate versions of the TCJA bill, which were respectively introduced on...

by New Deal democrat The slowdown cometh I submitted a long post on the above to Seeking Alpha. They haven’t put it up yet. When they do, I’ll link to it here.   UPDATE: Here’s the link. Long story short: you all know that a year ago I forecast a slowdown by about mid-year this year. Everything except for portions of GDP and jobs has acted in accordance with that forecast. And, judging by this morning’s ADP jobs report for May: the official jobs report...