The Angry Bear

Trump’s America First economic strategy looks a lot like the import substitution economic development strategy that was so popular several decades ago—notably in Latin America and South Asia..  But it only had limited success, especially compared to the export led growth strategy followed in East Asia.  Import substitution tended to produce fragmented, inefficient and low productivity industries protected from foreign competition by high tariffs and other...

The full text of the Trump administration’s new travel ban executive order via the Washington Post.

On March 7, 1965, a march by civil rights demonstrators was broken up in Selma, Ala., by state troopers and a sheriff’s posse.

From Diane Ravitch’s blog: While we’re consumed 24/7 with the Trump/Russia psychodrama, Republicans are quietly, under the cover of darkness and diversion, introducing these new bills in the House: HR 610 Vouchers for Public Education — (The bill also repeals basic nutrition standards for the national school lunch and breakfast programs) HR 899 Terminate the Department of Education HR 785 National Right to Work (aimed at ending unions, including teacher...

Some years ago I read this NBER working paper. (Note – a couple years later a slightly modified version appeared in the American Economic Journal but I will quote from the earlier, non-paywalled version since it is available to everyone.) Here’s the issue, in a nutshell: In this paper, we use administrative data from the Houston Independent School District and the Louisiana Department of Education to examine whether the influx of Katrina and Rita students...

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...