EconoSpeak

 Sigh, so much that is so obvious, and so much that is not, but so much that is so sad, especially as there seems to be little real prospect of any serious improvement or settlement on the underlying issues.  Indeed, it is probably the case we did not see anything happen for a good 7 years because from the Palestinian side things looked so hopeless in the face of ongoing Israeli expansion of settlements in the Occupied West Bank and increasing suppression of their rights, with more and more...

[embedded content]Credits: Reuben Walker, animation and music. Tom Walker, concept and design. Charles Wentworth Dilke, Sydney John Chapman, and Arthur Olaus Dahlberg, analysis and inspiration.

Today I learned that my EconoSpeak post, "Disposable People" (which has over 2500 views) has been reinstated by Blogger. I never knew it had been removed. If I was a GOP whiner, this would be a prime example of cancel culture in operation. But of course, it's only an artefact of moderation that has to rely on algorithms to identify potential community guidelines violations. 

  Two things I am especially pleased about that were sort of incidental at the time: 1. The prominence in the title of "ambivalence" -- the future is ambivalent -- and 2. the ending quote by Benjamin of a quote about stereoscopic vision. The "author's original version" can be downloaded from my dropbox at:https://www.dropbox.com/s/fdnc9c3yqv4m680/The%20Ambivalence%20of%20Disposable%20Time%20authors%20original%20version.pdf?dl=0

I learned a few days ago that Richard (Dick) Hollis Day died about a month ago.  There is no obit yet, so I do not have exact dates of birth or death, but communicating with an old mutual friend who knows his oldest son, apparently he succumbed to dementia and related problems that had him declining over the last several years at his home in Cambria, California.  He was born in 1933, but not sure of exact date, so he was either 87 or 88.  Dick was somebody I think underappreciated by the...

 The recent correlation I have noticed, with others commenting on it also, is that some of the most prominent nations with the most rapidly rising rates of coronavirus infections are led by somewhat authoritarian leaders who have recently dismissed the threat of it and engaged in policies that may have encouraged its spread.  The most dramatic examples are India, Brazil, and the Philippines.  Last year India did not do too badly. It had only one wave, which was pretty well controlled by...

 Today is May Day. An ancient point of the Gaelic calendar marking spring, it was long marked by pagan fertility celebrations and rites, dancing around May poles and the like, with many variations on this in different countries. The day became associated with the worker's movement in 1886 when in Chicago a movement for the 8-hour work day involved many demonstrations and strikes and ultimately a riot in Haymarket Square in Chicago that culminated in a bombing and a massacre (with both police...

 The death of Nobel Prize winner Robert A. Mundell at age 88 has brought forth much discussion about his work and legacy.  Most of this discussion, such as several columns by Paul Krugman, have commented favorably on the work for which he was officially given the prize, several papers he wrote in the late 1950s and early 1960s while he was at the IMF.  These papers, drawing on the experience of his native Canada at the time as a nation with a floating exchange rate and open to capital flows...

 So this is about the now getting to be passe topic of what will happen to inflation this year, with Larry Summers having gone out of his way to make a lot of noise in criticizing the expansionary fiscal policy partly passed but partly still under consideration in Congress as threatening a possible outbreak of 60s-70s style inflation at an entrenched much higher rate than we are seeing now.  He has put the probability of that at about a third, but considers this to be high enough to call for...

 Well, as we increasingly understand how environmentally damaging producing beef is, quite aside from lots of other issues, the proper issue should probably be, "nowhere."  But back in the early 1980s a fast food outlet, Wendy's (I originally said Arby's) ran an ad with this line that indicated that the beef was at their outlet while their competitors just did not have the real beef, what all potential customers really wanted.  Wendy's has never been all super successful although somewhat...