The Angry Bear

Is there a neo-classical theory of immiseration? Below is the marvelous Chapman hours of labor diagram (follow the link for a more detailed explanation). It looks complicated but it really only contains four curves representing, roughly, long-term and short-term productivity, income and fatigue. But there is more to it than Chapman realized or that I have previously noticed. The context for this diagram is William Stanley Jevons’s discussion of work...

by New Deal democrat Scenes from the employment report As I described in my detailed post on the April jobs report, below, almost everything moved in the right direction, and significantly so.  Let me lay out a few graphs to show the longer-term stronger and weaker points. In the good news department, the U6 underemployment rate has been falling at a good clip in the last few months, and at 8.6%, is about 0.6% from representing a reasonably “full” employment...

by Barkley Rosser Messing Up Badly In Korea In many areas where many were worried that President Trump would do this that or the other crazy thing he has held back for one reason or another.  But one very serious location where he has recently made a total botch of things has been in Korea, a series of unforced errors.  Of course before he got into it in Korea it looked like he might get in a shooting war with China, but then he decided that Xi Jinping is a...

by New Deal democrat April jobs report: a blowout — except (sigh) for wages HEADLINES: +211,000 jobs added U3 unemployment rate down -0.1% from 4.5% to 4.4% U6 underemployment rate down 0.3% from 8.9% to 8.6% 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 -74,000 from 5.781 million to 5.707 million Part time for economic reasons: down -281,000 from 5.553...

Via NYT comes this follow up to the document dump story last night in France: Yet within hours after the hacked documents were made public, the hashtag #MacronLeaks began trending worldwide, aided by far-right activists in the United States who have been trying to sway the French vote in favor of Ms. Le Pen. Jack Posobiec, a journalist with the far-right news outlet The Rebel, was the first to use the hashtag with a link to the hacked documents online, which...

From Wednesday postings: by New Deal democrat Holding Trump to account on manufacturing and mining jobs: setting the benchmarks Tomorrow is the April employment report, and at this point we can begin to hold Trump and the GOP Congress at least somewhat (but not fully for about 3-6 more months) accountable for the trend. For example, by this point 8 years ago, Obama and the Democratic Congress had passed the stimulus program, and the hemorrhaging of jobs,...

by Robert Waldmann Totally twitty Chait hate I admire Jonathan Chait. In particular, I admire his denunciation of those (e.g. Barack Obama) who criticize “some in my party” without naming names. His rule is that if one criticizes an argument, position or view, one should name and quote someone. Otherwise the temptation to debate straw men is irresistable. This fits Chait’s general (confessed) inclination to be mean — he doesn’t mind criticizing people by...

Via the NYT comes this major dilemma as a next step in the “money is speech” campaign: The head of President Trump’s re-election campaign accused CNN of “censorship” on Tuesday afternoon after the broadcast network refused to run the group’s latest advertisement. CNN said it would run the 30-second television spot, a celebration of Mr. Trump’s first 100 days in office, only if the campaign removed a section that featured the words “fake news” superimposed...

Larry Summers on Treasury Secretary Mnuchin (via WP), to put it mildly: Last week I suggested that I felt sorry for Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin. He found himself forced by circumstance and his president to say and do things that undermined his and Treasury’s credibility. I wish there was an external force that could be blamed for the secretary’s comments on Monday, but they look from the outside like unforced errors. At Michael Milken’s annual...

Lifted from comments by Dale Coberly… This year’s Social Security Trustees Report seems to be late as usual. But this is the LAST year that a gradual increase in the payroll tax can begin and still solve some of the less understood problems of the projected shortfall in SS funding: This is mostly that a gradual increase starting now preserves the Trust Fund at it’s current level… meaning the Congress doesn’t have to find the money to pay back it’s debt TO...