EconoSpeak

 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...

The story has been told that Martin Luther invented the doctrine of the "calling" and that John Calvin ("my friends call me Jean") intensified it with his doctrine of predestination. Subsequent pastoral literature softened the predestination blow with the Protestant ethic that working hard and succeeding would show that you were one of the elect. Max Weber told that story. It was, of course, a fable. But that is beside the point. Max Weber's fable wallowed in relative academic obscurity...

Or if you prefer, "bin Miriam," although no way he would have ever been called that in his life, but near as I know "Yeshua bin Yusuf" ("Jesus son of Joseph") was probably how he was most frequently identified in real life in the Aramaic language he mostly operated in, his mother tongue. It has been reported that he knew Hebrew, then strictly a liturgical language, given the reports of him at age 12 discoursing seriously with priests at the temple in Jerusalem. Greek was the lingua franca...