EconoSpeak

 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...

 Protesters trashed windows at the Oregon State Historical Society and left this graffiti: Credit: Willamette Weekly

 Yes, President Biden has bitten the bullet to remove US troops from Afghanistan by the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attack that triggered our initial entry into that nation for our longest war.  Of course, we shall not quite be fully out as not only will there still be some Marines guarding the embassy in Kabul, but probably covert CIA forces will continue to operate and drone bombing will probably continue and possibly even continue the expansion that has been going on for some time, with...

 I doubt this will surprise anybody, aside from those who might have hoped that Dems retaking formal control of both houses of Congress, if by narrow margins (with that margin shrinking in the House due to the 2020 election).  But I have a more direct source for this conclusion.I received a visit today from niece and her family at our house about two hours southwest of Washington.  She is Erica Werner, a longtime reporter for the Washington Post who has covered economics issues that Congress...

 So, Philip Mountbatten, born Philip Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderbutg-Glucksburg, Duke of Edinburgh, Prince Consort of the United Kingdom, and many other titles, died peacefully at age 99 on April 9 about 2 months shy of making it to 100.  I am not going to either praise him or poke at him, with his long history that contains many things on both sides of that open to judgment.  Certainly he was part of a colonialist monarchy, but them most of its empire broke up and went away during the period...

A defense of Weber's Protestant Ethic thesis from the 1940s by Ephraim Fischoff makes the plausible argument that critics -- and many supporters -- of Weber's essay attached unwarranted causality to it, as if "Calvinism caused capitalism." Instead, Fischoff explained:Weber's thesis must be construed not according to the usual interpretation, as an effort to trace the causative influence of the Protestant ethic upon the emergence of capitalism, but as an exposition of the rich congruency of...

 I am not a fan of rational expectations, hence the quotation marks around "rational" in the subject head here.  Nevertheless I have become aware thanks to some posts at Econbrowser by the intrepid Menzie Chinn that the usual way this has been measured and reported by most people needs to be modified, with the understanding of this only developing quite recently.  This came from a paper in 2018 by some Fed Board of Governors economists: S. D'Amico, D.H. Kim, and M. Wei, (although Menzie...

Following up on my last post, I was searching for coverage of Ronald Reagan's infamous "strapping young buck" comment from 1976 and found this wonderful commentary by Ian Haney López on Bill Moyers's show.[embedded content]In his book, Dog Whistle Politics, López mentions the "work ethic" angle several times.The narratives promoted alike by the ethnic turn and racial-demagogues—a lack of work ethic, a preference for welfare, a propensity toward crime, or their opposites— reinvigorated racial...

 One should probably not get too optimistic yet, although I have been getting quite worried about it, but a report in today;s New York Times seems to indicate that via the rather indirect negotiations going on in Vienna the US and Iran may have worked out a mutually acceptable path of actions that will lead to both nations getting back into compliance with the JCPOA, which the US pulled out of for no good reason in 2018 due to former President Trump.  President Biden has said he intended to...