EconoSpeak

 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...

 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...