The Angry Bear

by Sandwichman Why Economists Are Bad At Economics If you want an informed, thoughtful analysis of the effects of robotization on productivity, investment, employment and wages, ask an art school professor. Jason E. Smith’s two-part series, “Nowhere to Go: Automation, Then and Now,” (part one and part two) at Brooklyn Rail cuts through all the statistical aggregation category errors to highlight the accumulation dilemma that economists just don’t seem capable...

In this post, I want to look at the murder rate, by state. I ran a regression with the state murder rate for 2015 as the dependent variable, and literally threw the kitchen sink at it: demographics, weaponry, income, education, population density, etc. Basically, if its something some reasonable percentage of the population believes matters, and I could find data for it, I threw it into the hopper. I also included variables relating to immigration status. The...

Conversable Economist takes an interesting look at inequality: (worth a look…hat tip Spencer England) How Between-Firm Inequality Drives Economic and Social Inequality “The real engine fueling rising income inequality is `firm inequality’: In an increasingly winner-take-all or at least winner-take-most economy, the best-educated and most-skilled employees cluster inside the most successful companies, their incomes rising dramatically compared with those of...

Top 100 Economics blogs The Angry Bear blog is a very popular multi-author blog. This left-leaning blog provides incisive commentary on U.S./Economics, law and politics.

Via AngryBear Econ facebook page comes Dr. Robert Waldmann’s discussion of costs of healthcare and life expectancy  on Challenging Opinions. (among several others such as supply side economics…click the link above)

Second time Pence has cast the deciding vote in the Senate. Last VP to do so was Cheney in 2008. VP Pence has made it no secret he is opposed to allowing women the right to decide on having an abortions. While in Congress, Pence sponsored the first bill to defund Planned Parenthood in 2007 and when it did not pass then he continued the effort until it did pass in the House in 2011. More recently a Federal Court blocked a bill signed by then Indiana Governor...

Kung Fu Monkey has a sad. Paul Ryan has totally crushed his crazification factor h/t Kerry Eleveld This issue has made Paul Ryan into the most unpopular politician in the country. At the start of the Trump administration he had a 33% approval rating, with 43% of voters disapproving of him. Now his approval has plunged to 21%, with his disapproval spiking all the way up to 61%. I count this as a new event, because Ryan is very famous and 82% is respectably...

I was reading an article on one of the other blogs as written by an economist. In his article he discussed the 0.18% of total expenditures on one category. Then the blogger went on to describe the total expenditure as not being “18%, but rather a little less than one-fifth of 1 percent.” I asked the economist about the why of the additional explanation and whether this would be a legitimate fear that people might mistake 0.18% as being 18% and not less than 2...