The Angry Bear

Patrick Ruffini tweeted a graph showing a break in the trend of health care cost inflation with the ironic comment “The “Affordable” Care Act sure has bent the cost curve.” In the graph he posted, it is broken not bent. h/t @ChrisDeLong_ The trick is that the graph starts in 1996 & includes college tuition and software, so the huge change looks tiny. In comments, it is clear that other people can’t see what is right in front of their eyes (good thing...

You probably never heard of SCAAP, the State Criminal Alien Assistance Program.  But I expect it will be showing up in the news a lot pretty soon. This is what it does: The Bureau of Justice Assistance (BJA), Office of Justice Programs, U.S. Department of Justice, administers SCAAP, in conjunction with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS). SCAAP provides federal payments to states and localities that incurred correctional officer salary costs for...

Recently I discussed a paper by David Autor, David Dorn, Gordon Hanson, Gary P. Pisano and Pian Shu. The paper noted that as competition from China increased, innovation by US firms, measured by patent output, decreased. I believe the result, but started to wonder… are patents a good measure of innovation? Do patents drive economic growth? I don’t know how to measure innovation, but I can look at the relationship between patents and economic growth. We being...

It was a dark and stormy global night economy and a spectre task was haunting facing Europe… A new supply-side agenda for the left The task facing Europe is to meet the challenge of the global economy while maintaining social cohesion in the face of real and perceived uncertainty. Rising employment and expanding job opportunities are the best guarantee of a cohesive society. The past two decades of neo-liberal laissez-faire are over. In its place, however,...

Unlearning Economics is a person somewhere on planet earth. He or she has been debating with Simon Wren-Lewis and Nick Rowe (on twitter). Brad DeLong joined the discussion. But what about me. Elisabetta Addis (we’re married) just returned from Palermo. I was eager to talk with a physically present human being having not done so all day. First I said “Hodor” (and had to explain). Then, looking for a topic, I said, “Unlearning economics is someone who is...

Recently I learned about a proposal for Euro denominated “accountability bonds”. They are basically a clever way to enforce the stability and growth pact. I don’t like the pact, so I don’t support the proposal which I made by Clemens Fuerst here . The idea is that borrowing beyond the level allowed by the stability and growth pact could be financed only by special junior bonds. Owners of those bonds would lose everything before owners of senior bonds...

Back in 1934, the Bureau of Labor Statistics produced a fascinating and very readable book entitled History of Wages in the United States From Colonial Times to 1928 : Bulletin of the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics, No. 604. There’s lots of cool stuff there, but it quickly becomes apparent that Colonial America was a whole other country than today’s America. I want to quote extensively from the beginning of the book. (Note – I’m not going to copy...

I am aware of all internet traditions (with notably rare exceptions) and I think this might be another classic. In a generally very good article in Politico Tim Alberta wrote “Ryan is poor salesman with a great grasp of policy” [skip] “After he unveiled the bill, leading health care experts on the right like Yuval Levin and Avik Roy trashed it as a poorly conceived mess; ” So having a great grasp of policy is consistent with writing an immensely important...

by Barkley Rosser (originally published at Econospeak) Complacency Or Community Commitment? Human And Social Capital Reconsidered I have been poking at Tyler Cowen’s recent book on The Complacent Class, along with those who have praised it unstintingly, with my main complaint being that what he calls complacency may really be fear.  In an exchange posted today between Tyler and Noah Smith at Bloomberg, Noah makes many of my points, saying that what people who...

by New Deal democrat Variations on the Phillips Curve: unemployment and underemployment This is part of a longer post I wanted to write, and if FRED didn’t play so poorly with iPad I would put it all up.  But, having finished with my cursing, let me put up a truncated version now and follow up with another one sometime in the next week. This picks up on my post from several days ago in which I noted that a fuller explanation of the cycle of wage gains should...