EconoSpeak

 On his Marginal Revolution blog, Tyler Cowen describes the recent "purge" in the trucking industry. The pandemic shift in demand towards goods, as opposed to services, produced a big increase in the demand for trucking, which in turn produced a huge response, including a  big increase in the number of small trucking companies. Now that is all being reversed, precipitously, with trucking companies falling like flies--the purge.This all sounds very, very "cobwebby" to me. It was Muth's...

 Probably the most famous characteristic of chaotic dynamics is the phenomenon known formally as sensitive dependence on initial conditions, which is more popularly known as the "butterfly effect." In such dynamics a small change in a starting value or a parameter value can rapidly lead to very different outcomes from what would have happened otherwise.  It was first clearly identified and labeled by the climatologist, Edward Lorenz, in 1963 in a paper in the Journal of Atmospheric...

 Robert (Bob) Haveman died on June 18, aged 85.  He had been at the University of Wisconsin-Madison since 1970, when I first met him, where he served as Chair of the econ dept., director of the Institute for Research on Poverty, and also Director of the LaFollette Institute for Public Policy.  A very policy-oriented economist with a progressive perspective, he published widely on public finance, poverty and social policy, environmental and natural resources economics, and benefit-cost...

 Jason Furman and Janet Yellen have both suggested that cutting Trump's tariffs would  be anti-inflationary. But most economists agree that the incidence of the tariffs is  for the most part on US consumers, not foreign suppliers (pace the treasonous and ignorant former president, who crowed about all the revenues we were raising from China). So how is a tax cut anti-inflationary?  There is a supply-side effect, which is all to the good, but the demand-side effects may well wash that out. So...

 I am not all that much into posting about the ups and downs of the Special Operation in Ukraine, but it seems that there has been one of those lines crossed. While it was not widely publicized, June 10 was apparently a deadline set by V.V. Putin for Russian forces to conquer Severodonetsk.  While reportedly they control a solid majority of that now mostly destroyed city, with 90% of its population having left, Ukrainians still control portions, especially an industrial zone, somewhat...

 Today is 6/6/22, 78 years after 6/6/44, D-Day, when American, British, and Canadian troops stormed beaches in Normandy to push the Germans out of France.  It was a dramatic landing, with many dying heroically, and depicted in several highly popular movies with famous actors in them, including The Longest Day and Saving Private Ryan. While not a full-blown holiday, it was recognized today, with ceremonies in certain locations such as the World War II Memorial in Bedford, Virginia about an...

 I don't know if you saw the series on Haiti in last week's Times--pretty good-- "pretty, pretty good "as Larry David might say.One section concerns the reaction of the French to Aristide's call for reparations. Who do you think led the so-called Commission that France formed to "consider" the question, and by consider I mean "absolutely refuse to consider," and then went to Haiti to not-so-subtly threaten Aristide with the fate of Allende if he didn't drop it? None other than Regis...

 Apparently President Biden will be visiting Riyadh as part of his forthcoming Middle East tour. The report on this coincides with an apparent end to negative comments about the nation's Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MbS), whom the CIA has accused of having ordered the execution and chopping up of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. It must be admitted that MbS has made some progressive moves, allowing women to drive and reigning in to some extent the power of the Mutaween religious police. But...

On April 27 a bot began viewing one post on EconoSpeak every five minutes. It continued to do so until yesterday when I reverted the post to draft. That's 288 fake views every day for a little over a month. Looking back at overall EconoSpeak traffic there are unexplained spikes that occur every two months or so. Tens of thousands of "views" suddenly appear out of the blue. There is so little real friendship in the world.

 The Economist in each issue has an obituary on its final page. The one for May 21 was of Saotome Katsumoto of Tokyo, Japan, whom I had never heard of who just died at age 90. Apparently he had been the main person documenting details of the event that involved more people dying at a single time in a single place in world history, although the obit did not specifically point that out.  It did note that the event did involve more people dying than some related more famous events, namely the...