The Angry Bear

Dan here…Angry Bear Steve Roth’s clear and thorough writing continues…please go to the original for more graphs…I could not include the largest in the Angry Bear format in its proper place.  Go straight to read more to view the whole post…. By Steve Roth (originally published at Evonomics) Insanely Concentrated Wealth Is Strangling Our Prosperity Remember Smaug the dragon, in The Hobbit? He hoarded up a vast pile of wealth, and then he just hung out in...

Dan here…Angry Bear Steve Roth’s clear and thorough writing continues…please go to the original for more graphs…I could not include the largest in the Angry Bear format in its proper place.  Go straight to read more to view the whole post…. By Steve Roth (originally published at Evonomics) Insanely Concentrated Wealth Is Strangling Our Prosperity Remember Smaug the dragon, in The Hobbit? He hoarded up a vast pile of wealth, and then he just hung out in...

A thought for Sunday: the most important issue in the 2016 election was . . . This is a post I’ve been meaning to write for several months. For a while after the election last year, there was a debate about whether the “economic anxiety” in the (white) working class was the most important factor vs. was it simply a matter of racism. The consensus has nearly settled on the narrative that racism was decisive, to the point where “economic anxiety” has...

A thought for Sunday: the most important issue in the 2016 election was . . . This is a post I’ve been meaning to write for several months. For a while after the election last year, there was a debate about whether the “economic anxiety” in the (white) working class was the most important factor vs. was it simply a matter of racism. The consensus has nearly settled on the narrative that racism was decisive, to the point where “economic anxiety” has...

Here’s a fascinating graph from an article in the Lancet: Click to embiggen. (The figure should show deaths all the way to >95 years) The graph is a bit complicated at first, but it will convey some interesting information if you stare at it. What jumps out at me is how many more people were dying under age 25 in 1990 than in 2016. The number of deaths in 2016 v. 1990 increased dramatically for those above 25, particularly among the older cohorts....

United States Code Title 18 § 227 #TakeAKnee

by Peter Dorman (originally published at Econospeak) Ta-Nehisi Coates and the Limited Art of Interpretation Among the least persuasive writers on contemporary politics, for me, is Ta-Nehisi Coates.  Mind you, I often agree with him, but only because I agreed with him before reading him.  If I go into a piece of his with a different perspective, nothing he says has an effect on me. Now, if I were intellectually stubborn, the sort of person who rarely...

There’s a fascinating but barely-accessible-to-a-non-neurologist article about habit formation. Here is a pretty good summary, albeit with an un-helpful title: A single kind of neuron deep within the brain serves as a “master controller” of habits, new research in mice indicates. Some habits are helpful, such as automatically washing your hands before a meal or driving the same route to work every day. They accomplish an important task while freeing up...

The asterisk in real median household income This is a follow-up to the post I wrote last week about the latest data on real median household income. One of the things I notes is that “households” includes the millions that are composed of retirees, a burgeoning demographic due both to healthier longevities and the demographics of the Boomer generation. This morning Jared Bernstein helpfully includes a graph of real median household income excluding...