EconoSpeak

That would be the one at my alma mater, the University of Wisconsin-Madison.  I have learned that on July 6 one of its current members died, Bill Sandholm, an excellent evolutionary game theorist who was about 50 years old.  It is a sign of my age that he always seemed quite young to me, barely older than my oldest daughter, and now he is dead.  He was a very nice guy, aside from being a very capable economist who was the Richard Stockwell Professor of Economics and once helped me out with a...

Sigh.  So the US election is now just four days less than being four months from now, and, really, anything can happen. After all, four days less than four months ago was March 11, just before the US fully recognized  that we were in a pandemic, with everything closing, and "the economy falling off a cliff," as it is now put, but was not obvious  on 3/11 at all, even though it was only about two days away.  And the murder of George Floyd was still some time off.  So, the world can turn...

The President's keeps saying that the US has the lowest Corona-virus fatality rate in the world.  And he keeps talking about how we have a high number of cases because we test more. The game he is playing is evident, but I keep waiting for  the talking heads to point it out and being disappointed. He is referring to the US case-fatality rate, not the per-capita fatality rate. More testing lowers the case-fatality rate (deaths/case), simply by increasing the denominator. But it simultaneously...

This continues to the final day the schedule for the virtual 30th SCTPLS conference, registration due July 6 at societyforchaostheory.org/2020/conf .Friday, July 248:00-9:30 AMSession AOrlando Gomes, ISCAL, Portugal "Behavioral saving"Yuji Aruka, Chuo University, Japan "The evolution of exchange processes"Akio Matsumoto, Chuo University, Japan "Stability swtiching in Cournot duopoly games with three delays"Session BKarim Cherif, UMMTO, Algeria "Human resource marketing: A new strategy to...

I am currently President-Elect of the Society for Chaos Theory in Psychology and Life Sciences (SCTPLS), which means I am in charge of organizing their 30th annual conference. It was to be held this year at the University of Toronto, July 22-24, but it will be a Zoom virtual conference on those dates (first day a workshop). Anyway, the registration deadline is July 6, site to register societyforchaostheory.org/2020/conf . All are welcome.  I list the program for the 23-24 below, for your...

The macroeconomic forecasting business has become quite unhinged in the current situation, with existing models seeming to have their wheels coming off as old relationships simply do not hold and reported data seems unreliable and going in all sorts of directions.  We have already seen this happen regarding forecasts that were made for the May employment numbers, with most forecasters projecting employment declines that would have been more than 10%, some of them by a lot more than that,...

Unfortunately it was going to happen, and we who support the movement need to call out those instances where it goes too far.  I am talking about the justified Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, mostly characterized by widespread peaceful protests even in small rural towns that never see such things, and with a solid majority of the American people currently supporting both the BLM and its main demands.  As it is, one should probably not tie the BLM to some of these recent unacceptable...

Probably,  although it is unclear whether or not we are having a V-shaped recovery (see most recent post here). However, whatever it is, it looks like the revived spread of the coronavirus is probably slowing it somewhat.  New cases are up by 15% nationally from low point several weeks ago, and there are reports of businesses of various sorts closing, if not whole communities.The pattern of the increase has various aspects:1) It seems to be now more in red states than blue states, with the...

Maybe.This is a matter where if it happens, I shall be proven wrong.  I have mostly emphasized how much uncertainty and lack of knowledge we face about the pandemic as well as the economy in this situation, and have as a result largely stayed away from making specific or definite forecasts on those matters.  However, here and in other places on the internet, I have made a lot of forecasts that the time path of GDP is likely to look like a "lazy J" or "whoosh," a pattern of a slow recovery...

It has become a widespread meme that the many protests over the murder of George Floyd and other racially based police brutality will show that it is fine to end all shutdowns related to the pandemic and end all rules about social distancing and wearing face masks.  Here we are reaching two weeks since these protests with thousands of people involved, supposedly all violating those rules, and we are not seeing a surge of Covid-19 cases coming out of the locations where these big protests...