The Angry Bear

It appears that the US government has separated mothers and their children and doesn’t know how to get them back together again. In particular, this is extremely difficult if the children are under 2 and don’t know their family name (looking for someone identified only as “mommy” or “mia madre” is challenging. I think a data company with some need to apologize to the world can make itself useful. It is not too hard to match 3000 children who are too...

Prime age employment participation and wages: not so clear a relationship In the last couple of months variations of the same graph which is supposed  to “solve” the wage conundrum have been going around. I saw another version this weekend: Easy to see, there is what looks like a nice, nearly linear relationship between the prime age (25-54) employment to population ratio (left scale) with wages as measured by the employment cost index (ECI)(bottom...

What to Do about Conservative Rationality in Addressing Climate Change? Two business-friendly conservatives, both former senators, Trent Lott and John Breaux, have an op-ed in today’s New York Times announcing the formation of new group, Americans for Carbon Dividends.  Now out of office, they recognize climate change as “one of the great challenges of our generation.”  To counteract it they propose a bipartisan coalition to institute a carbon tax, with...

A piece of work is Professor Walter E. Williams of George Mason University. Back in February, I flagged a column by Williams in which the nimble prof performed the lump-of-labor fallacy shuck and jive. One of the venues for that rendition of Will Automation Kill Our Jobs was David (“Trump is 100% right”) Horowitz’s FrontPage Mag. Little did I know at the time that just three weeks earlier, Williams had penned a defense of Trump’s (Sessions’s, Miller’s)...

I don’t want to pretend that this explains everything. But it is “another brick in the wall,” so to speak, if not the keystone. In January 2015, Senator Jeff Sessions produced an “Immigration Handbook for the New Republican Majority,” written by his communications director, Stephen Miller. Miller’s analysis in the handbook is just the sort of thing that economists would denounce as a “lump-of-labor fallacy.” Curiously enough, few did. They were much too...

by Bradford DeLong   (originally published at Grasping Reality with Both Hands) THE DAMNATION OF THE PROFESSIONAL REPUBLICAN POLICY INTELLECTUALS I have long known that the thoughtful and pulls-no-punches Amitabh Chandra has no tolerance for fuzzy thinking from Do-Gooder Democrats. He is one of those who holds that not even a simulacrum of utopia is open to us here, as we muck about in the Sewer of Romulus here in this Fallen Sublunary Sphere. ”There are...

“Deeply Disturbing” It’s not a crime if you brag about it on T.V. In fact, it’s hardly worth mentioning. What is this about? “We don’t know the answer, but we hope the inspector general will find out.”

Cartoonist Rob Rogers was fired from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette for refusing to do cartoons extolling the virtues and accomplishments of Trump. According to The Association of American Cartoonists; “Rob Rogers is one of the best in the country and his cartoons have been a wildly popular feature of the Post-Gazette. Readers looked forward each morning to opening their papers to see Rogers’ latest pointed commentary.” Things changed for Rob when the...

Children make the bestest hostages Criticisms of Trump in the business press are especially instructive, because they have no obvious partisan motivation. So Josh Barro’s article at Business Insider this morning, castigating his “bully-and-threaten approach to dealmaking,” is particularly noteworthy. He writes: Donald Trump has a negotiating tactic he really likes: Threaten to do something someone else will really hate, and then offer to stop if they...