The Angry Bear

Kevin Hassett (chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers) talking to PBS NewsHour: “Federal workers who are without pay as the government shutdown drags on actually have it pretty good. A huge share of government workers were gonna to take vacation days, say, between Christmas and New Year’s. And then we have a shutdown, and so they can’t go to work, and so then they have the vacation, but they don’t have to use their vacation days. And...

I hope and trust that this will be an amusing display of my ignorance. I don’t hope to reach David Graeber’s level David Graeber: Apple Computers is a famous example: it was founded by (mostly Republican) computer engineers who broke from IBM in Silicon Valley in the 1980s, forming little democratic circles of twenty to forty people with their laptops in each other’s garages… 1. How did Jeff Bezos get so rich ? His wasn’t a subtle idea. The first...

This is an almost semi serious proposal suggesting payday lenders could get good publicity. There are many entities with plenty of spare cash. The US Treasury isn’t one of them. I think that the good publicity gained by offering zero interest loans to unpaid federal employees is worth the cost. They are good credit risks because they will get paid (without interest) eventually. I’d say some entity with spare liquidity could help the country and win...

How Shocking Was Shock Therapy? In 2007 Naomi Klein got quite a bit of attention and mostly favorable comment for her book, Shock Doctrine. It promulgated that global elites used periods of crisis around the world to force damaging neoliberal policies derived from the Chicago School and Washington Consensus upon unhappy populations that suffered greatly as a result. This was “shock therapy” that was more like destructive electroshock than any sort of...

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report) August 31, 2015: As America’s bridges, roads, and other infrastructure dangerously deteriorate from decades of neglect, there is a mounting sense of urgency that it is time to build a giant wall. Across the U.S., whose rail system is a rickety antique plagued by deadly accidents, Americans are increasingly recognizing that building a wall with Mexico, and possibly another one with Canada, should be the country’s top...

Good news from the employment report: workers are finally getting raises! When it comes to jobs, if there is one trend that really set apart 2018 from any prior year of this expansion, it is that ordinary workers are finally getting decent raises. Let’s start by looking at the monthly % change in average hourly wages for non-managerial workers for the entire duration of this expansion. Since this has averaged about +0.2%/month, I’ve subtracted that so...

2018 – The Year of the Complicated Suburb, Amanda Kolson Hurley, CityLab In the past several years, a much more complex picture has emerged—one of Asian and Latino “ethnoburbs,” rising suburban poverty, and Baby Boomers stuck in their split-levels. 2018 really drove home the lesson of when Americans say they live in the suburbs (as most do), the suburbia they describe are vastly different kinds of places where people of every stripe live, work, pray,...

December jobs report: 2018 goes out with a bang HEADLINES: +312,000 jobs added U3 unemployment rate rose +0.2% from 3.7% to 3.9% U6 underemployment rate unchanged at 7.6% Here are the headlines on wages and the broader measures of underemployment: Wages and participation rates Not in Labor Force, but Want a Job Now:  declined -70,000 from 5.397 million to 5.327 million Part time for economic reasons: declined – 124,000 from 4.781 million to 4.657...

Can We Minimize Econogenic Outcomes? I am back from the annual ASSA/AEA meetings in Atlanta.  I learned a new term that on checking I find has been around for about five years. It is “econogenic,” coined by George DeMartino, who spoke on this in a session on “Ethics and Economics” held by the Association for Social Economics. It means “harm done by economists,” and it is inspired by “iatrogenic,” referring to harm done by physicians.  His talk focused...