The Angry Bear

by Peter Dorman (originally published at Econospeak) Fifty Shades of Yellow? Post-Truth Then and Now Simon Wren-Lewis can’t take it anymore. I’ve just read his fulminations on the blatant dishonesty of right wing media outlets in the US and the UK, untethered to any residual professional attachment to standards of evidence and nakedly in the service of political ideologues. He’ll get no argument from me about that. But I think his distinction between...

by New Deal democrat What’s behind stalled nonsupervisory wage growth? Wage growth for nonsupervisory workers nominally has been stuck in the +2.3% to +2.5% range (or worse) for three years.  Why? Over the weekend I was cleaning out some old graphs, and came across this one from the Atlanta Fed, suggesting that the Phillips Curve (the tradeoff between unemployment and inflation) is very much alive, with the tweak that the amount of wage growth follows a...

Via Tyler Cowen, here is a piece by David Autor, David Dorn, Gordon Hanson, Gary P. Pisano and Pian Shu. Cowen quoted the most important part, so let me follow his lead: The central finding of our regression analysis is that firms whose industries were exposed to a greater surge of Chinese import competition from 1991 to 2007 experienced a significant decline in their patent output. A one standard deviation larger increase in import penetration decreased a...

“House leaders postponed a vote Thursday on their plan to overhaul the nation’s health-care system, casting doubt on whether President Trump and House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) can deliver on one of the GOP’s central promises to the voters who placed Republicans in power. Lawmakers and White House officials continued to express confidence that the revisions to the Affordable Care Act would pass by week’s end, and talks resumed soon after leaders announced...

Here’s a graph showing the number of attorneys as a share of the US population: The increase seems pretty inexorable starting around 1970, doesn’t it? For grins and giggles, here’s snide graph on which I will make no comment: If you’re wondering where the lawyers live, a quick google search turned up this post which shows attorneys by state. Needless to say, the share of attorneys as a percentage of the population is greater in the District of Columbia than...

by New Deal democrat Housing, production, and JOLTS all good news We’ve had a good run of economic news this week. First, in the leading housing sector, both of the most important datapoints made new highs.  Single family permits, which are just as leading as permits overall, but much less volatile, made yet another post-recession high.  Further, the three month rolling average of housing starts, which are more volatile and a little less leading, but...

Via Economists View (some of the comments are worth review as Deirdre McCloskey comments).  Also see below Peter Dorman’s   Review of Economism: Bad Economics and the Rise of Inequality by James Kwak at Econospeak. Adam M. Finkel at RegBlog: It Takes “Alternative Math” to Claim That Redistribution Is Futile: The unequal distribution of costs and benefits across society is one of the hottest topics in the regulatory arena—and one that, regretfully, has sparked...

In 2026, an estimated 52 million would be uninsured in the US, a dramatic reversal from the 2016 uninsured count of 28/29 million. Pretty much, the Republicans will put healthcare back to the way it was pre-2014 if Paul Ryan’s bill is passed by Congress and Donald signs the bill in its present form. - By 2018, 14 million could be uninsured with many of the uninsured practicing the tyranny of a minority, as John S. Mill might call it, upon the rest of the...