The Angry Bear

Peter Dorman calls attention to a NYT Upshot column by Neil Irwin about the cost of climate change. For Irwin, the question can be framed as a matter of discounting, “A dollar today is worth more than a dollar tomorrow and a lot more than a dollar in 100 years. But what discount rate you set determines how much more.” As Irwin admits, the discount rate is a “business concept.” His conclusion, then, follows exclusively from a business concept of “how, as a...

reader alert: I am going to quote and discuss Trump tweets “Do you notice we are not having a gun debate right now? That’s because they used knives and a truck!” My immediate reaction was to tweet this this is why we should have a gun debate right now. The fact that 3 terrorists killed 7 victims not 70 shows the benefits of UK gun control. In the USA a single terrorist killed 49 people . My reactions to the horrible news from London included the thought...

by Peter Dorman   (originally published at Econospeak) The Cost of Climate Change: It’s Not About Psychology You know there are problems with economics when things that are perfectly reasonable in the context of economic theory are clearly absurd once you step out of it.  Case in point: the claim in today’s New York Times piece by Neil Irwin that the economic cost of climate change vs the actions we’d need to mitigate it depends on “how, as a society, we...

Economics is a simple field. Just about everything can be described in terms of supply and demand. If the supply of something is scarce but the demand for it is strong, its price rises. On the other hand, if there is a lot of supply but little demand, its price will go down. Now, buyers and sellers can engage in certain strategies to weight the scales. For example, sellers of a product can band together (perhaps by buying each other out) to achieve some...

May jobs report: nothing more nor less than a decent late cycle report HEADLINES: +138,000 jobs added U3 unemployment rate down -0.1% from 4.4% to 4.3% U6 underemployment rate down -0.2% from 8.6% to 8.4% Here are the headlines on wages and the chronic heightened underemployment: Wages and participation rates Not in Labor Force, but Want a Job Now: down -146,000 from 5.707 million to 5.561 million Part time for economic reasons: down -53,000 from 5.272...

Gas prices on verge of turning negative YoY There are two important aspects to the inflation rate right now. One, as Dean Baker reminds us today, is that most of core inflation has been caused by housing, via “owners equivalent rent.”  Take that out, and inflation is only 1%: The second important aspect is that almost all the variation in headline inflation is due to the price of gas. At the beginning of this year, I thought one of the big issues would be...

I’ve recently stumbled on a twitter account called New Real Peer Review. The twitter account is largely (but not entirely) dedicated to posting abstracts of journal articles and links to the papers. Here’s one such abstract: This article explores the formation of a tranimal, hippopotamus alter-ego. Confronting transgender with transpecies, the author claims that his hippopotamus “identity” allowed him to (verbally) escape, all at once, several sets of...

Via International Business Times (via RSN): Trump Administration’s Infrastructure Plan Involves Privatizing America’s Assets and Selling Them to Goldman Sachs>/a> President Donald Trump’s administration this week touted an infrastructure plan that would sell off public assets to private financial firms. Left unsaid in the White House promotional materials was any mention that the Trump aide who is overseeing the initiative comes from a Wall Street firm...