The Angry Bear

A Race To Suppress Academic Freedom? The race is between the two nations competing for global dominance, the US and China.  This post is triggered by an unnamed editorial in today’s Washington Post (probably authored by Fred Hiatt) criticizing China for imposing ideological limits on Chinese universities.  Since the recent party congress, 40 universities have set up centers for studyiing Xi Jinping Thought.  14 universities have come under attack for...

I think of the debate over net neutrality as a fight over the rules of the game where the game is the delivery of information and entertainment. There are big corporations arguing all sides of the issue. All of them are happy to explain how the position they advocate will benefit the public. But nobody seems interested in discussing issues pertaining to the very bedrock on which the communication industry is based. That bedrock is the right of the way...

(Dan here…Lifted from Bonddad blog by NewDealdemocrat): More on housing I’ve elaborated on my dissection of October housing permits and starts over at XE.com. Anecdotally, I know of three twenty-somethings, two of whom are single, who are blue collar workers in the construction or retail sectors, all of whom are in the process of moving out of apartments into existing homes. The story for all three is basically the same: compared with rents, the monthly...

Has the Phillips curve vanished ? There is widespread discussion of the possibility that the Phillips curve has become horizontal. I am old enough to remember when all serious economists agreed that, in the long run, it is vertical. The reason for the thought that it might be horizontal is that large important countries have unemployment lower than estimated non accelerating inflation rates, and yet still have low inflation (including low wage...

The more people think about the Republican proposal to cut corporate taxes the worse it looks. Most people dismiss the argument that the benefits will trickle down to workers. Supporters’ argument is that reduced taxes on profits will cause increased investment which causes higher production and wages. There are strong arguments that the tax cut won’t cause firms to invest more. But aside from that, increased investment wouln’t cause (all) of the...

Proposing A Judicial Coup Via A Tax Bill On today’s Washington Post editorial page in a column entitled “Packing the courts like a turducken” (a deboned duck within a deboned chicken within a deboned turkey, or something like that, all for Thanksgiving, thank you), Ronald A. Klain not only reports on the actual push to pack courts with lots of young, incompetent extremists that is going on after Congress sat on judicial nominees by Obama in recent years,...

Two Powerful Women Losing Power That would be respective Angela Merkel and Janet Yellen, both reported to have lost a lot of power in today’s Washington Post.  During at least the last year, if not the last four, they have been probably the two most powerful women on the planet. In the case of Merkel, what has happened is that she has failed to form a coalition government after last month’s election, which put her and her party in the lead, but not...

This article looks at the future of colleges and universities: There are over 4,000 colleges and universities in the United States, but Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen says that half are bound for bankruptcy in the next few decades. Christensen is known for coining the theory of disruptive innovation in his 1997 book, “The Innovator’s Dilemma.” Since then, he has applied his theory of disruption to a wide range of industries,...

Another article from Jared Bernstein Washington Post: There’s an interesting sort of argument going on between Stansbury/Summers (SS) and Mishel/Bivens (MB). My name has been invoked as well, so I’ll weigh in. It’s a “sort-of” argument because there’s less disagreement than first appears. It all revolves around this chart, which plots to the real compensation of mid-wage workers against the growth in productivity. For years they grew together, then they...