The Angry Bear

I’ve recently stumbled on a twitter account called New Real Peer Review. The twitter account is largely (but not entirely) dedicated to posting abstracts of journal articles and links to the papers. Here’s one such abstract: This article explores the formation of a tranimal, hippopotamus alter-ego. Confronting transgender with transpecies, the author claims that his hippopotamus “identity” allowed him to (verbally) escape, all at once, several sets of...

Via International Business Times (via RSN): Trump Administration’s Infrastructure Plan Involves Privatizing America’s Assets and Selling Them to Goldman Sachs>/a> President Donald Trump’s administration this week touted an infrastructure plan that would sell off public assets to private financial firms. Left unsaid in the White House promotional materials was any mention that the Trump aide who is overseeing the initiative comes from a Wall Street firm...

Via Salon, another Goldman Sachs story: Ted Cruz failed to properly disclose Goldman Sachs loans: FEC This has not been a good week for Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas. First he is the butt of a cutting joke by Democratic Sen. Al Franken of Minnesota (who told “USA Today” that “I like Ted Cruz probably more than my colleagues like Ted Cruz, and I hate Ted Cruz”), and now the Federal Election Commission has ruled against him — unanimously, no less. The three...

Fighting Zombies with Zombies Larry Mishel and Josh Bivens enlist zombie government policy ponies in their battle against “the zombie robot argument“: Technological change and automation absolutely can, and have, displaced particular workers in particular economic sectors. But technology and automation also create dynamics (for example, falling relative prices of goods and services produced with fewer workers) that help create jobs in other sectors. And even...

Paul Krugman talks unions: Trucking And Blue-Collar Woes MAY 23, 2017 5:11 PM May 23, 2017 What with everything else going on, this Trip Gabriel essay on truckers hasn’t gotten as much attention as it should. But it’s awesome — and says a lot about what is and isn’t behind the decline of blue-collar wages. Trucking used to be a well-paying occupation. Here are wages of transportation and warehousing workers in today’s dollars, which have fallen by a third...

A thought for Sunday: no, Trump approval *still* isn’t imploding. BUT … Democrats continue to delude themselves about Presidential approval polls — with one very big possible exception. In the first place, can we all agree that Trump has had a particularly nasty last several weeks? Including firing Comey, blabbing secrets to the Russian ambassador, blabbing about our submarines to the Philippines’ now-dictator, compromising the intelligence sources of Israel...

Of Memorial Day and Confederate statues Memorial Day is a particularly fitting time to write about the issue of Confederate monuments. That’s because Memorial Day originated as a day set aside to honor the Civil War dead, not just those who fought for the Union, but those on both sides, including those who died in service of the Confederacy.  It was part of the process of magnanimous victory which enabled the country to heal, perhaps epitomized nowhere better...

One of the topics I’ve railed about many times during the decade and change in which I’ve been blogging is that society would be much better off if we forced people to pay the cost of negative externalities they impose on other people through their behavior. An obvious example would be making polluters pay for the cost that the pollution they emit inflicts on everyone else. But it turns out there are a lot of these behavioral externalities in healthcare. For...