EconoSpeak

As of earlier tody, 4/29/20,. according to "Our World in Data" ourworldindata.org/coronavirus, there are currently nine nations that based on looking at the three-day rolling average, have rates of increase of more than 5 per million per day.  They are in order with their rates:Belgium 15.97 Ireland 10.73 UK 9.2 Spain 9.01 Sweden 8.38 Italy 7.82 France 7.32 USA 6.2 Netherlands 6.13.For what it is worth, many of these are declining, although source only showed this over time for a sub-sample...

Not only is the current level of testing for the coronavirus insufficient, the tests themselves are flawed.  Read this summary by infectious disease specialist Michael Osterholm and a coauthor for particulars.  Their key policy conclusion is A blue-ribbon panel of public health, laboratory and medical experts, ethicists, legal scholars and elected officials should be convened immediately to set out a road map with realistic goals for testing and contact-tracing. If we had a reliable...

More than a century later, we still do not  know the origin of the Spanish flu, with at least three currently scientifically supporte origins out thers: North America (possibly Kansas), China, and British soldiers in France. This will not be resolved.  I suspect that this may become the outcome of the current debate over the origin of our current pandemic.  While mostly this seems to have become a matter of random infection from animals versus an accident in a lab in Wuhan, upon further...

Republican rule in the US is a horror show.  We get incoherent ramblings from our president on injecting bleach into our veins, calls for the states to file for bankruptcy from the Senate majority leader, a veto of modest IMF support for developing countries hammered financially by the virus, and a complete absence of guidance on the most crucial aspects of public health.We already know this.The greater tragedy is that the Democrats are barely better.  Their program, to the extent it makes...

I am putting this up because I have been hearing seeing people making claims about this that do not agree with what I have just seen at Statista for today, the 50th anniversary of the first Earth Day, for deaths per million according to the pandemic virus. I am not going to comment on the list further, although I am tempted, but the situation is changing so fast.Belgium Spain Italy France United Kingdom Netherlands Switzerland Sweden Ireland USAOh, I suppose I should provide the same list...

A half century ago today was the first Earth Day, which I paerticipated in while at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.  Although I did not know him well, I even met the founder of the event, then Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin.  While it is easy to be discouraged by the ongoing failure to deal with the global warming issue as well as the large amount of rollbacks of reasonable environmental regulations in the US by Donald Trump, with several happening very recently under cover of the...

Yes, earlier this afternoon, very briefly, western Canadian oil was selling for $ -0.15.  At least I saw a report of this.  The price may have been there for only three seconds, but it is the first time I have ever heard of there being negative oil or energy prices ever.  Negative interest rates, which are now quite common are one thing, but negative oil prices?OTOH, some energy related assets have had negative prices before. I am thinking of abandoned coal mines and some highly polluting...

Yesterday morning, after reading the Sunday New York Times, I posted two pieces on EconoSpeak within a few minutes of each other.  One was a short, cute little item (a visual grab from the paper) entitled “The Art of Juxtaposition”; the other was a longer, more substantial takedown of a deficit hysteria “analysis” I called “The Usual Deficit Blather from the New York Times”.As usual, I monitored the posts through the day to see if they were being picked up anywhere.  This has become largely...

I posted the above chart four days ago in "From Social Distance to Social Justice" to illustrate Arthur Dahlberg's argument about the eventual consequences of a declining labor share of income. Dahlberg was inspired by Stephen Leacock's The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice and both Leacock and Dahlberg were influenced by Thorsten Veblen. The chart also illuminates arguments made by Moishe Postone about Marx's theory of capitalist production. I happen to agree substantially with...

Seen in today's New York Times in Print: