The Angry Bear

An article by Nirej Sekhon in the American Criminal Law Review entitled Blue on Black: An Empirical Assessment of Police Shootings looks at 270 officer-involved-shooting incidents that occurred in Chicago between 2006 and 2014. His data comes from Chicago’s Independent Police Review Authority (“IPRA”) summary reports of intentional officer-involved shootings. The article has interesting graphs. Some of the graphs fit the popular narrative: Some don’t:...

by David Zetland (originally published at Aguanomics) So what now, America? I was going to call this post “I told you so, America,” but I want to change people’s perspectives and motivate action more than be right. First of all, let’s all agree that the flood damages to Houston were worse due to poor planning that paved wetlands and allowed the city to sprawl into flood plains. Second, subsidized flood insurance (or the lack of a requirement for...

If you have been in a 401K like I have over the decades, you know this has been helpful in reducing tax on your income. If you do not know this, you do now. The GOP is making eyes on your 401k contributions with the intent of removing the upfront deduction which lowers your taxable income. The GOP would like to go to a Roth type of 401k. Either way, I would be ok. The problem I have with this idea is it is being presented as a way to help holders of a...

Trickle-down, with the emphasis on “trickle” Since the turn of the Millennium, a torrent of corporate tax cuts has resulted in a trickle of investment growth. This morning Dean Baker objects to: the argument … that reducing corporate taxes will lead to more investment and thereby greater wage growth in the future. The data from the last seventy years show there is no relationship between aggregate profits and investment. As can be seen, there is no...

Last year I wrote a post noting that the income of group of immigrants in the US is correlated with the income of the country from where those immigrants hailed. I noted that this correlation is especially strong for immigrants in the US for the longest. I just stumbled on this paper from earlier this year by Joakim Ruist. Here’s the abstract: This paper aims to explain the high intergenerational persistence of inequality between groups of different...

Bruce Bartlett’s twitter comments offer a look at one of this September’s issues.

I stumbled on a blog post by Jerry Ratcliffe, who is a Professor of Criminal Justice and Director of the Center for Security and Crime Science at Temple University, Philadelphia, and a former police officer with London’s Metropolitan Police (UK). From one of this posts: Graph no. 2 is another image from my Intelligence-Led Policing book. The crime funnel represents what happens to a random selection of 1,000 crimes that affect the public (top bar). It...

Reader Dan sends along this one: (this was my newbie persona ten years ago http://angrybearblog.com/2007/05/reader-dan-on-insurance.html) ——————- My insurance in MA was cancelled on property due to ‘limiting risk exposure’ by my insurance company. While near the coast, my investment property is not on a flood plain and well protected as well as being higher by far (40 ft.) than downtown. I wound up having to buy from a MA backed plan at 1.5 multiplier for...

Via New York Times comes this information on flood insurance, which I believe is the predominate cause of storm damage in the Houston area and beyond: Private homeowners’ policies generally cover wind damage and, in certain cases, water damage from storm surges. But for almost half a century, all other homeowners’ flood coverage has been underwritten by the National Flood Insurance Program, a federal program that itself faces financial uncertainty....