EconoSpeak

The hare was a child so badly treated and offended by the other people because he had such long ears that he went off to live alone.When he sees someone, he puts his ears back; for when he hears a man's call, he thinks they are talking about his long ears. He doesn't have a tail because he didn't have one before.Walter Benjamin's "Program for a proletarian children's theater" was not published during his life. According to Jack Zipes, the editors of  Alternative: Zeitschrift für Literatur...

 Should I not be posting on the ongoing threat by Putin against Ukraine that is current dominating the news? Nobody is talking about Kazakhstan.  Yes, that is right, which means maybe somebody should, if just to sort of check up on what was The Big Crisis very recently.So indeed it looks that the uprising that cost quite a few lives and resulted in a lot of damage is completely over, along with having several thousand people get arrested.  The Putin people are all praising him for bringing...

Illustration by Tom Seidmann-FreudIn the beginning, none of the animals was endowed with intelligence. When they saw a hunter coming towards them who wanted to kill them, they stopped, looked at him and were shot. So our Lord sent someone who put all the senses in a sack and put it under a big tree. The weasel noticed this, ran to the hare, told him about it and said: "Brother hare, let's go there, and if you want to take the sack, I'll give you good advice." When the hare tried to carry the...

 A long time ago, sometime before the 2008 crash, prices of Brent crude oil and West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude ran close to each other.  WTI would from time to time would exceed Brent, with them kind of bouncing around as they moved along. This changed with the financial market crash of 2008, with Brent becoming chronically higher than WTI, nearly always by several dollars per barrel. For various reasons arbitrage did not operate fully to bring those prices back together again.But today...

 An article about me and my wife, Marina, has just come out at the cover story at Madison Magazine, the alumni magazine of James Madison University, where I work.www.jmu.edu/madisonmagazine.Barkley Rosser

 Tyler Cowen links to a an NBER working paper with an excerpt from the paper: “Under only the efficiency channel, the optimal minimum wage is narrowly around $8, robust to social welfare weights, and generates small welfare gains that recover only 2 percent of the efficiency losses from monopsony power.” A measly $8 ?  So much for the "efficiency" channel. What are the other channels? Here is the abstract:It has long been argued that a minimum wage could alleviate efficiency losses from...

This is what new Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin said when he made an executive order on the first day of his term to ban school systems from having mask mandates. Some systems will not go along, including that in Arlington and mine in the city of Harrisonburg. He claims to be defending the rights of parents, somehow not noting that he is violating the rights of parents who do not want their children be forced to be in school with unmasked children, thus raising their chances of getting...

On January 13, the US Supreme Court, by a vote of 6-3, blocked the Biden administration’s vaccine mandate.  The policy took the form of an emergency OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Administration) standard and would have required all firms with more than 100 workers to mandate vaccination or a testing regime as a condition for remaining employed.  The conservative majority on the court argued that this measure was too far from the original intent of the law to warrant the deference that...

 Maybe. We have gotten so used to the idea that to the extent it is even meaningful it is flat at inflation rate of 2%, nobody talks about the old textbook Phillips Curve that slopes down.  But there is some evidence that out of all these pandemic upheavals it may be back, at least for awhile. If this is the case then indeed there may be a tradeoff, and the higher inflation the US is experiencing may be due partly to strong fiscal and monetary stimulus, with that also bringing about higher...

 Adorno's metaphor of the "matadors of the culture industry" didn't fall out of the sky. Nearly four decades earlier -- sometime between 1931 and 1933 -- he had written several short pieces, one of which was titled "Applause." I came across mention of it when I was looking to see if Susan Buck-Morss had anything to say about pseudo-activity in her The Origin of Negative Dialectics. I didn't find anything on pseudo-activity there but her quote from "Applause" seemed to tie right in to the...