The Angry Bear

Here is the abstract from a paper that appeared two years ago in Molecular Psychiatry: Intelligence is a core construct in differential psychology and behavioural genetics, and should be so in cognitive neuroscience. It is one of the best predictors of important life outcomes such as education, occupation, mental and physical health and illness, and mortality. Intelligence is one of the most heritable behavioural traits. Here, we highlight five genetic...

by New Deal democrat Do “high pressure” low unemployment economies lead to more capitalinvestment? The Atlanta Fed’s Macroblog has an interesting article today on whether a “high pressure” low unemployment economy leads to more capital investment. At least based on surveys, they answer in the negative, with companies pulling out the old chestnut of being unable to find qualified help “(at the wage we want to pay”). But the article reports on one survey only,...

by New Deal democrat Larry Summers: genius economist, failure at Psychology 101 One of my recurring themes is how macroeconomic theory, no matter how elegant mathematically, consistently errs because it fails to take into account basic psychology — i.e., how the human animal actually works. A big component of this failure is that humans, like other primates and apparently like just about every other social species, are hard-wired to inflict punishment on...

Dean Baker’s screed, Bill Gates Is Clueless On The Economy, keeps getting recycled, from Beat the Press to Truthout to Real-World Economics Review to The Huffington Post. Dean waves aside the real problem with Gates’s suggestion, which is the difficulty of defining what a robot is, and focuses instead on what seems to him to be the knock-down argument: Gates is worried that productivity growth is moving along too rapidly and that it will lead to large scale...

In a comment on Nineteen Ninety-Six: The Robot/Productivity Paradox, Jeff points out a much simpler rebuttal to Dean Baker’s and Jared Bernstein’s uncritical reliance on the decline of measured “productivity growth”: Let’s use a pizza shop as an example. If the owner spends capital money and makes the line more efficient so that they can make twice as many pizzas per hour at peak, then physical productivity has improved. If the dining room sits empty because...

by New Deal democrat Do healthier longevity and better disability benefits explain the long term decline in labor force participation? A few weeks ago I took another deep dive into the Labor Force Participation Rate.  There are a few loose ends I wanted to clean up (at least partially). One of the most noteworthy things about the LFPR in the long term is that, for men, it has been declining relentlessly at the rate of -0.3% YoY (+/-0.3%) for over 60 years!...

by Sandwichman The “Cutz & Putz” Bezzle, Graphed by FRED anne at Economist’s View has retrieved a FRED graph that perfectly illustrates the divergence, since the mid-1990s of net worth from GDP: The empty spaces between the red line and the blue line that open up after around 1995 is what John Kenneth Galbraith called “the bezzle” — summarized by John Kay as “that increment to wealth that occurs during the magic interval when a confidence trickster knows...

I’m no expert on South Africa, but I did some reading and pieced together a brief history of the country’s last 50,000 to 150,000 years. It begins with the San. Depending on who you ask and what evidence they are looking at, the San people have been in Southern Africa for somewhere between 50,000 to 150,000 years. For most of that time, the San and a related population, the Khoi Khoi (more on them below) have been the only people in Southern Africa. As a...

A suggestion from Michael Halasy: The Randian Congressman Paul Ryan has turned off ALL of his public telephones & fax machines in response to protests in favor of the Affordable Care Act, Planned Parenthood, Medicare, etc. He is also NOT accepting signed petitions and is TURNING-AWAY voters who deliver the petitions. So, let’s see what 67 million postcards looks like in his driveway. Please start mailing postcards to his HOME: Congressman Paul Ryan 700...