EconoSpeak

Credit to Matthew Yglesias for his discussion of the incompetence of Donald Trump as well as the excuses for it from his defenders including: Officials have also cited the Posse Comitatus Act as a complicating factor that helps explain why Trump was so much slower to dispatch assistance to Puerto Rico than the Obama administration was to send help to Haiti after it was devastated by an earthquake in 2010. Except this 1878 Congressional Act does not bar the President from calling in the...

Buried on the back pages of this busy week has been the news that in Iraqi Kurdistan on Monday there was a referendum on independence reportedly supported by 92% of the voters.  I imagine that is not inaccurate, and that there was strong support for this referendum, even as Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) President Massoud Barzani says that it is only advisory and a prelude to negotiations with the central Iraqi government.  As it is, this vote is not being treated as such, and there has...

Yes, for a period of time, according to some sources, I was a member of the "Kaldorian" school of Post Keynesian  economic thought, although I had not previously thought of myself as such, indeed, had been unaware that there even was such a school of economic thought.  But now, according to such sources, I am no longer a member of such a school.  Indeed, it is not clear that there even is such a school, if there ever was.  This is a tale of the ongoing tangle of schools of Post Keynesian...

The Jones Act was passed 97 years ago to protect US shipping within the US from foreign-made ships.  I doubt I ever would have supported such an act, but at least back then there were plenty of US-made ships to fulfill the demand. Despite the Jones Act, the US shipping industry has collapsed in the last century so that the number of such ships is far below demand in normal circumstances, so that intra-US shipping costs are far higher than those outside the US.  Puerto Rico was covered by he...

As someone who has denounced the Saudi leadership and its new crown prince, Muhammed bin Salman, for maintaining their nation's position as the only one in the world where women are not allowed to drive, I must salute them for changing their law.  They are joining the rest of the world and will allow women to drive now, by all reports the top demand by women in the kingdom for their rights.  Welcome to the rest of the world, Saudi Arabia and Prince Muhammed bin Salman, of whom it had long...

Apropos #takeaknee and the previous post:Most of the discussion about whether NFL and other athletes should stay on their feet during the pre-game singing of the Star Spangled Banner miss the point.  Kneeling is a political statement, but so is not kneeling.The public staging of the national anthem is a political event.  It began in professional baseball during World War I as a demonstration of support for the war effort (before the SSB was even officially the anthem), at a time when...

United States Code Title 18 § 227 #TakeAKnee

This is the bane of urban development, right?  Old housing stock, built for yesterday’s working class, is spiffed up and priced far out of reach of today’s regular folk.  High end shops replace hardware stores, bric-a-brac recyclers and appliance repair centers; a tide of designer coffee flushes out the cheap, refillable kind.  Who can afford to live there?But wait!  Those refurbished old houses are beautiful.  It’s a pleasure to peruse delicate artisanal fabrics and custom-designed...

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 changes his mind, that would be a statement about me, not Coates.  In fact, I’m always changing my mind.  Nearly every day my views are shifting,...

The following email was forwarded to me and many other Evergreen faculty: On [date deleted], students, staff and faculty of The Evergreen State College will hold a Re-Convocation Rally on Red Square to express and affirm their commitment to goals of equity, inclusion and success for all in pursuit of higher education. The rally is organized by Staff and Faculty Acting for Equity, a group that works in partnership with Evergreen students. Rally organizers stated that the “focus will be on...