The Angry Bear

By Steve Roth (originally published at Evonomics) Today’s mountains of wealth throttle the very engine of wealth creation itself. Insanely Concentrated Wealth Is Strangling Our Prosperity Remember Smaug the dragon, in The Hobbit? He hoarded up a vast pile of wealth, and then he just hung out in his cave, sitting on it (with occasional forays to further pillage and immolate the local populace). That’s what you should think of when you consider the...

By Maia Szalavitz via Naked Capitalism and cross posted from Evonomics; originally co-published at the Guardian and Economic Hardship Reporting Project. Why Inequality Predicts Homicide Rates Better Than Any Other Variable – research suggests that inequality raises the stakes of fights for status among men. The connection is so strong that, according to the World Bank, a simple measure of inequality predicts about half of the variance in murder rates...

I had a post the other day trying to make sense of changes in healthcare costs. Based on some of the comments to that post, a bit more thought, some data from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, and the CPI-All Urban Consumers, I think my point distills down to this graph: (click to embiggen) The graph shows the annual YoY change in real healthcare costs defined three three ways. The green line shows the annual change in total healthcare...

Does Iran Have A “Poland Problem”? Maybe somewhat, but not as much as Poland does, with a “Poland problem” being where a well performing economy does not prevent political unhappiness.  Iran is experiencing massive demonstrations that are heavily driven by economic complaints, even though economic performance has improved since the adoption and approval of the JCPOA nuclear deal.  Prior to that, in the face of economic sanctions, the Iranian economy was...

This National Bureau of Economic research paper is behind a paywall, but the premise is up for discussion: This Paper challenges two widely held views: first that trade performance has been the primary reason for the declining share of manufacturing employment in the United States and other industrial economies, and second that recent productivity growth in manufacturing has actually been quite rapid but is not accurately measured. The paper shows that...

(Dan here…Social Security is an issue that seems to generate a lot of firm beliefs and passion, as witness recent threads.  It is rare that people refer to actuary material.  On the other sides of the issue are people like Andrew Biggs, who is knowledgeable and smart in his arguments.  I am posting this as a reminder to readers that contributors do usually go the extra mile…in this case even recently, and since 2008 with Dale, Bruce Webb, and Arne...

I don’t follow healthcare as much as others at this blog. I started playing around with some graphs at FRED and got a bit confused. I don’t mind being confused, but I like to clear up that confusion eventually. So perhaps someone can tell me what’s going on. First, this graph of healthcare expenditures / GDP which seems to indicate that Obamacare bent the cost curve: (click to embiggenize) But looking at the annual change in healthcare expenditures /...

Via Robert Waldmann via  Paul Krugman: The central fact of U.S. political economy, the source of our exceptionalism, is that lower-income whites vote for politicians who redistribute income upward and weaken the safety net because they think the welfare state is for nonwhites  to Noah’s opinion :  A few people have noticed me tweeting a lot more about racial/cultural issues in the last two years, and less about the nuts and bolts of economics. Well, let...

By Steve Roth  (from 2016 October 2) In the millennias-long evolution of human societies and economic systems, we find ourselves today at a pass where three systems predominate, and fitfully cohabit: democracy, capitalism, and socialism. Most countries in the world operate with large doses of all three. Given that, it might seem odd that there are so many loud and prominent political voices who talk about eradicating one or more of the three. These...