The Angry Bear

This is a brilliant Twitter essay. Click the link, but I think it can be partly summarized with the first and last two tweets. 1/I noticed Brit Hume defending Tucker Carlson’s remarks about diversity today, and it made me think about how ideas go from the political extremes to the political mainstream. I kind of have a model in my head for how this process happens. if media entrepreneurs like Bannon and Carlson had chosen to focus on things like kneeling...

Some History In 1980, a letter to the editor of the New England Journal of Medicine by the Boston Collaborative Drug Surveillance Program stated “the risk of addiction was low when opioids such as oxycodone were prescribed for chronic pain.” It was a brief statement by the doctors conducting the study which was cited many times afterwards as justification for the use of oxycodone. In a June 1, 2017 letter to the NEJM editor, the authors reported on the...

New article on tax increment financing in Missouri shows impact of KS/MO border war After several years of work, my colleague Susan G. Mason (Boise State University) and I have published a new article on TIF in Missouri, specifically in the St. Louis and Kansas City metropolitan areas. “Exploring Patterns of Tax Increment Financing Use and Structural Explanations in Missouri’s Major Metropolitan Regions” appeared in the July 2018 edition of the HUD...

Scenes from the August jobs report 1. The strong trend of people entering the jobs market and getting jobs remains intact Here’s a nice graph put together by Kevin Drum at Mother Jones showing both a linear and curvilinear trend line (which are nearly identical) (red) with the prime age employment to population ratio (blue): The trend is intact and quite positive, despite the one month decline. 2. Involuntary part-time employment is near 25 year low...

Next Friday could be a very bad day somewhere along the East Coast I think I may have mentioned once or twice that I am a nerd, right? So, last year during hurricane season I got hooked on a site called Tropical Tidbits. The neat thing about this site — well, from a nerdy point of view — is that it posts the GFS model forecast, updated every 6 six hours, for the next two weeks! While you normally don’t hear forecasts more than five days out, I noticed...

by New Deal democrat August producer data goes in the opposite direction from the consumer I have a new post, “Producers are Hot*, but Consumers Maybe Not,” up at Seeking Alpha. in which I contrast the white hot ISM manufacturing report with the lackluster motor vehicle sales and residential construction — the two biggest durable consumer purchases. As usual, not only is reading it hopefully informative, but also compensates me a little bit for the...

August jobs report: overall progress, with some new highs and some givebacks – by New Deal democrat HEADLINES: +201,000 jobs added U3 unemployment rate unchanged at 3.9% U6 underemployment rate declined -0.1% from 7.5% to 7.4% (NEW EXPANSION LOW) 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:  rose 226,000 from 5.163 million to 5.379 million Part time...

by Joseph Joyce The Euro At Twenty: Mody’s EuroTragedy The euro will mark its twentieth anniversary in 2019. Is this a cause of celebration and congratulations? Or a case of a well-intentioned policy gone awry? Ashoka Mody in his new book , EuroTragedy: A Drama in Nine Acts, offers an account that shows that the joint currency was flawed from the outset, and has been further weakened by poor policy choices. Mody, a distinguished research economist at the...