EconoSpeak

Dr. Anthony Fauci has testified before a Senate committee that he is worried that there may be a serious "Second Wave" oof the current SARS-CoV-2 pandemic in the United States.  The basis for this fear is the experience over a century ago with the Spanish flu, still deadlier than the current pandemic.  It came in three full waves, and of those the second was easily substantially larger than the other two.  The lag between the first and second was several months, and as of now no nation that...

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My wife, Marina, as many of those reading this know, is from the Soviet Union, and takes extremely seriously the anniversary of the victory of the Soviet Union and its allies over Nazi Germany, which became official at 10:45 PM in Berlin on May 8, 1945, which was 12:15 May 9 Moscow time. So, while all of the rest of the world celebrates VE Day on May 8, now in Russia today is Victory Day, as it is called everywhere outside the US, although I just saw a clip from the day itself in London...

For some time now it has become commonplace for people to describe business cycles by how they resemble one letter or another, although obviously this amounts to a lot of handwaving. But it does provide bright images.  Thus Trump and crew seem to believe that the US will experience a V recovery, one that will boom up as rapidly as it fell down, so the sooner we can reopen America the sooner he can get that boomy uptrun to guarantee his reelection. Somehow he fails to understand that if he...

I am late to issue this RIP as John Horton Conway died on April 11, 2020, having been born in England, Dec. 26, 1937. He died of coovid-19.  I was aware of his death when it happened, but have since become aware of things he did that I did not know about that have pushed me to post this.Conway was one of the world's best known mathematicians, most famous for creating the Game of Life a half century ago in 1970, which was publicized by Martin Gardner in Scientific American.  It is what I knew...

Keynes and Knight famously simultaneously in 1921 identified the concept of fundamental uncerainty as a situation not understandable by using a probability distribution, an idea popularized by Nassim Taleb just as the 2008 crash happened as a "black swan."  Taleb defined white swans as situations describably by Gaussian normal distributions.  For situations not full uncertainty or white swans Taleb coined the idea of "grey swans," situations exhibiting "fat tails" and more generally lots of...

The FDA has approved Remdesivir for emergency use and Gilead Science will denote its current 1.5 million vials, which could potentially treat 300 thousand patients as it takes 5 to 10 treatments per patient. The WHO wants more Remdesivir: The World Health Organization said Monday that it will speak with the U.S. government and Gilead Sciences on how antiviral drug remdesivir could be made more widely available to treat Covid-19 as data of its effectiveness emerges. At some point we will...

Planet of the Humans, directed by Jeff Gibbs but featuring Michael Moore as its “presenter”, has been viewed by almost five and a half million people since it popped up on YouTube last month.  In case you haven’t heard, it’s quite a provocation, and the response from almost every quarter of the environmental movement has been outrage.  It traffics in disinformation and scurrilous personal attacks, they say, and I can’t argue.  Two big problems: it falsely claims that more carbon is emitted...

Yesterday President Trump erupted with a series of demands and threat against China, focusing on various claims about its role in the current pandemic.  I have here noted some issues with China's conduct, but Trump makes it completely impossible that there will be any of the much-needed cooperation between the US and China to overcome this virus.  He has gone absolutely bonkers.He has now threatened to remove China's sovereign immunity so people can sue it, with a former lawyer of his...

Robert May died on April 28 at age 84 of unreported causes.  He has been described as "the grandfather of chaos theory," which I think exaggerates, but he was the second person to adopt the term after James Yorke first applied to a porticular type of irregular nonlinear dynamics subject to the "butterfly effect" of sensitive dependence on initial conditions (butterfy effect having been coined by the late Edward Lorenz to climate modeld, a reason we cannot make weather forecasts beyond a week...