The Angry Bear

The Tsunami of Tstupidity An edited video of an encounter between Senator Diane Feinstein of California and a group of young campaigners for the Green New Deal is eliciting much outrage and indignation on Twitter. Senator Feinstein’s unpardonable offense is that she became impatient with being repeatedly interrupted and made a few sarcastic remarks having to do with her knowledge, experience and authority and their lack of those characteristics. I don’t...

by Steve Roth The Eighth Way to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist Asymptosis  February 22nd, 2019 The teams at Rethinking Economics and Doughnut Economics have launched a contest for entries, asking “What’s the 8th Way to Think Like a 21st Century Economist?” It builds on Kate Raworth’s seven ways, here. Here’s my entry: 8. Widespread prosperity both causes and is greater prosperity: From false tradeoffs to collective well-being. “Okun’s Tradeoff” —...

 by New Deal democrat Weekly Indicators for February 18 – 22 at Seeking Alpha My Weekly Indicators post is up at Seeking Alpha. The short leading indicators have sunk to a level that is consistent with an oncoming recession in the next 3 – 8 months.  But the recent government shutdown may still be skewing some of the data. As always, not only is clicking and reading hopefully informative for you, but it also helps reward me a little bit for the effort I...

Neoliberalism as Structure and Ideology in Higher Education  A few weeks ago I speculated on the structural aspect of neoliberalism at an economy-wide level, the way its characteristic framing of economic decision-making may have emerged from changes in the role of finance in business and the composition of high-end portfolios.  My purpose was to push back against the common tendency to view neoliberalism solely as a philosophy, to be countered by other...

by New Deal democrat Housing may bottom this spring Despite yesterday’s poor existing home sales report, which was the worst in over three years, the bottom in housing may be near. This post is up at Seeking Alpha. As always, reading the post should be helpful to you, and renumerates me just a bit for my efforts.

Netanyahu Sinking While the wise and up-to-date observers declare the two-state solution between Israel and Palestine to be deader than dead, I continue to think that morally it is the best solution for this deeply difficult problem. However, one leading force in sending this solution into the grave is Binyamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, who is up for reelection very shortly. He has for some time been pushing the situation towards a hard...

A Hill-HarrisX poll released Tuesday found that 25 percent of Democrats said they would back Michelle Obama in the party primary over nine other declared or potential candidates, including Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Kamala Harris (D-Calif.), Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), and former Rep. Beto O’Rourke (D-Texas). 5% error in Democrat only questioned. Cited reasons for her being a top choice? She is mostly an unknown, never a candidate, never been on a...

This should come as no surprise as I have written on the topic of Healthcare Costs and Its Drivers before. In particular, the overriding statistic from an earlier post was 50% of the increase in healthcare costs was due solely to price increases between 1996 and 2013 (JAMA, Factors Associated With . . . . Adjusting for inflation, “annual health care spending on inpatient, ambulatory, retail pharmaceutical, nursing facility, emergency department, and...

100 years of industrial production This is a post that can literally be written only once in 100 years! Because as of last Friday, it has been exactly 100 years since the first publication of industrial production by the Fed in January 1919. So this is a good time to take a sweeping historical look at production in the United States. The first graph below is the entire 100 year history, on log scale so that equal percentage changes in each time period...