The Angry Bear

The Trump administration’s new policy of expanding the sale of “short-term” insurance plans as a cheaper alternative to ObamaCare is quickly running into opposition from state regulators. The Department of Health and Human Services is urging states to cooperate with the federal government, but instead, insurance commissioners are panning the new plans as “junk” insurance and state legislatures are putting restrictions on their sales. State insurance...

David Frum does not have a favorable view of Dinesh D’Souza and his latest movie, “Death of a Nation.” He argues sthat D’Souza’s alleged history is fiction, and that D’Souza is governed almost entirely by resentment of all of the experts in all of the fields in which he dabbles, who note that he is dishonest, partisan, and unoriginal. It is alarming that D’Souza has become prominent again and is praised by the President. However, I do agree with D’Souza...

Manual Transmission Foils Car Theft “A press release from the Nashville police department said they arrested two teenagers last Wednesday aftr they attempted to carjack two women that day and failed. The teens ultimately failed both times, with the second being because the car had a manual transmission. They had to run away on foot.” We Reserve the Right to Refuse Service . . . A British woman tried to place an order at her local McDonald’s while on...

Four measures of wages all show renewed stagnation This is something I haven’t looked at in awhile. Since 2013, I have documented the stagnation vs. growth in average and median wages, for example here and here. I last did this in 2017. So let’s take an updated look. We have a variety of economic data series to track both average and median wages: The most  commonly known measure is that of average hourly pay for nonsupervisory workers, which is part of...

Real wages decline YoY, while real aggregate payrolls grow With the consumer price report this morning, let’s conclude this weeklong focus on jobs and wages by updating real average and aggregate wages. Through July 2018, consumer prices are up 2.9% YoY, while wages for non-managerial workers are up 2.7%. Thus real wages have actually declined YoY: In the longer view, real wages have actually been flat for nearly 2 1/2 years: Because...

“as a” Kwame Anthony Appiah has an op-ed in Sunday’s New York Times dissecting the “as a” locution, in which one first announces one’s gender, race, sexual orientation, or class position before making an argument during a public discussion.  He interprets it as a claim to represent the entire group defined in the preparatory clause, and explains why this claim is invalid; better you should begin with “speaking for myself”.  But I disagree with his...

June 2018 JOLTS report evidence of both excellent jobs market and taboo against raising wages Yesterday’s JOLTS report remained excellent, suffering only in comparison to last month: Hires were just below their all-time high of one month ago Quits were just below their all-time high of one month ago Total separations made a new 17-year high Openings were just below their all-time high of two months ago Layoffs and discharges rose to their average level...

Would Serious Climate Change Mitigation Policy Increase World Hunger? That’s the finding of a recent study published in Nature Climate Change, “Risk of Increased Food Insecurity under Stringent Global Climate Change Mitigation Policy” by an international team of 22 researchers.  (Coauthorship like this is why god created et al.)  The abstract has made the rounds of the blogosphere, including Marginal Revolution, which is where I found it. The article...

by Joseph Joyce Empires, Past and Present Economists rarely write about “empires,” unless they are referring to historical examples such as the Roman empire. But Thomas Hauner of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis,  Branko Milanovic of the Graduate Center of City University of New York and Suresh Naidu of Columbia University have presented a study of empires using criteria drawn from an economics classic, John Hobson’s Imperialism (1902). The same...