The Angry Bear

Is the US economy booming? April 2018 update Back in January, I asked if the economy was “booming.” There’s no official definition, but based on my recollection of the two periods I have lived through that felt like booms, the1960s and late 1990s, the two times in my life that the feel of an economic boom was palpable, I answered in the negative. I considered a number of indicators of well-being, to see what stood out in those two periods, and concluded...

(Dan here…lifted from Robert’s Stochastic Thoughts) Thoughts on Capehart on Kagan I ì’m reading the Washington Post and note one very outstanding op-ed by Catharine Rampell which you should just read. She links to excellent summaries of social science research and notes that Republicans don’t listen to experts and aren’t reality based.But I want to write about a dumb op-ed by Jonathan Capehart. I’m picking on him partly to explain what is so...

February 2018 JOLTS report: positive trend revised away Last month I wrote that the January JOLTS report reflected very positive trends. Today they got revised away. As a refresher, unlike the jobs report, which tabulates the net gain or loss of hiring over firing, the JOLTS report breaks the labor market down into openings, hirings, firings, quits, and total separations. I pay little attention to “job openings,” which can simply reflect that companies...

The OM Wiener award goes to House Speaker Paul Ryan. Paul Ryan can’t just leave, go home, and check with Oscar Mayer to see if he can still drive the OM Wiener Mobile again like he did as a college student. Naaaw, instead he is threating baby boomers with making them pay again for their SS. Ryan: “The one thing I obviously care a great deal about is entitlement reform and in particular health care entitlement reform,” To put it into Randian language, the...

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...