The Angry Bear

A thought for Sunday: The Abyss always looks back, Presidential polling edition A point I have made about economic forecasting a number of times is that one can be an excellent forecaster, so long as one is a bug on the wall. Once a significant number of people begin to follow *and act upon* the forecast, to that extent it must necessarily lose validity. Take for example the yield curve, much in the news this year. So long as everyone ignores or excuses...

A Teachable Moment: The Importance of Meta-Learning Today’s New York Times has a fine article by Manil Suri about math education and the development of reasoning skills.  Its concluding point is that, while the general contribution of the first to the second is weaker than you might think, math instruction can be improved by bringing the math-reasoning tests themselves into the classroom.  I’m pretty confident that Suri is right, since I’ve seen...

The REAL Trump pee-tape was a urine sampling pyramid scheme. “Whatever happened to Trump neckties?” asks  Zane Anthony, Kathryn Sanders and David A. Fahrenthold at the Washington Post, “They’re over. So is most of Trump’s merchandising empire.” Among the products that Trump lent his name to, for a fee, was a vitamin supplement, supposedly custom formulated based on the results of a urine test: “Take a snapshot of the most critical metabolic markers in...

I am posting this NPR Fresh Air radio article here because it talks about a part of our society that has not been talked about much.  When it comes to discussion of taxation, social programs, how our economy works, the basic premise of free market misses an awful lot. From the page: For many poor families in America, eviction is a real and ongoing threat. Sociologist Matthew Desmond estimates that 2.3 million evictions were filed in the U.S. in 2016 — a...

This particular Sears opened in 1938 with over 100,000 people visiting it during its 1st day. The store was located at the intersection of Irving Park Road, Cicero Avenue, and Milwaukee Avenue known as Six Corners and situated on the edge of the Portage Park Community. Hillman’s grocery was located in the basement. Hillmans later moved across the street and the Sears expanded. It was a prosperous store and offered many amenities including the customary...

(Dan here…I have highlighted NDd’s conclusion. This is a long post but worth thinking about…) So in conclusion, while I have no doubt that the “monopsony” argument is measuring something real, I am more and more inclined to believe that raising wages is simply becoming an ideological taboo among businesses, a higher priority than maximizing net profits after costs. by New Deal democrat Is raising wages becoming a taboo? Yesterday I noted that, while the...

Unresolved Issues In Happiness Economics From The Conference Honoring The Retirement Of The Field’s Founder That would be Richard A. Easterlin, age 92, retiring this spring from the U. of Southern California after being there since 1981, following an earlier stint at U. of Penn, where he got his PhD under Simon Kuznets.  Kuznets in turn got his from Wesley Clair Mitchell, who was in turn the student of Thorstein Veblen, and it was mentioned (by me...

In a low inflation world firms tend to raise prices once a year — typically in the first quarter or the first quarter of their fiscal year. Consequently, over half of the annual increase in the not seasonally adjusted core CPI occurs in the first quarter and doubling the first quarter increase gives an amazingly accurate estimate of the annual rise in the core CPI. Figure 1 This year the first quarter rise in the not seasonally adjusted core CPI was 1.2%...

Here I go again, commenting on Krugman. But this time on a 5 year old talk on the risk that investors will lose confidence in the solvency of the US Treasury “CURRENCY REGIMES, CAPITAL FLOWS, ANDCRISES”. I think the talk about the risks of excessive budget deficits and unsustainable debt accumulation is much more relevant today than it was in 2013, since Republicans currently in power (not just Trump) will eliminate confidence that the US Treasury...