EconoSpeak

This is a frontispiece to a 1951 mystery novel by Josephine Tey (real name: Elizabeth Makintosh) named _The Daughter of Time_It is about the question of whether or not King Richard III ordered the murder of the "Little Princes in the Tower," his nephews Edward and Richard, as has  long been alleged, and for a long time was simply accepted as historical fact.  This bestselling and very well and wittily written novel makes the case that Richard was framed by his successor, Henry (Tudor) VII,...

That would be the quintessentially establishment and boringly conventional Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development, the Paris-based "rich nations'" entity that grew out of the Marshall Plan and has a reputation for excellent data, and also the Congressional Budget Office, generally regarded as bipartisan and highly professional.So I saw their forecasts of US economic performance in terms of GDP and unemployment rates for the end of this year, and I find both to be highly...

There are two general ways to reduce the transmission of the virus.  One is “engineering”, changing the physical environment, the other is “social”, changing behavior to keep people distant from each other.  Under engineering we can include not only physical partitions, UV lighting and ventilation, but also mask-wearing and other PPE.  I know, there is a very large behavioral component to masking, but I want to focus on the distancing aspect, so let’s put everything else in the engineering...

When my stomach can take it, which is rarely, I take a look at Marginal Revolution.  Tuning in today, I see Cowen predicting that the intellectual right  will become much more open to deviations in the future -- as long as all agree in being anti-leftist. And the latter involves, of course, the condemnation ad nauseam of "Cancel Culture." Look I don't like this retail stuff they go on about either, but isn't it rich to hear the GMU crowd, using Koch money and the influence it buys to keep...

Hoping to buy a nice bottle of French wine? Doug Palmer of Poltico has some bad news for you: The Trump administration announced Friday a 25 percent tariff on $1.3 billion worth of French handbags, cosmetics and soaps in retaliation for a digital services tax on U.S. internet giants, but said it would suspend imposing them for up to six months. The United States believes the way the French tax is structured unfairly targets large U.S. internet companies like Facebook, Google and Amazon....

Arguably this is paranoia, but the mayor and police chief of my city do not think so and have officially reacted with formal response.  What a sign that I am an old whatever, praising local law enforcement, but, well....So the issue is that late last evening a truck full of masked white men, and no, we are not talking health masks but ones that cover ID, with flags waving including the Confederate battle flag, were going up and down our block taking photos of certain houses, including ours. ...

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...