EconoSpeak

I think Farhad Manjoo gets it right about Amazon: while the company's sheer size, not to mention its often shady business practices, call out for public intervention, "Amazon is pushing a level of speed, convenience, and selection in shopping that millions of customers are integrating into their daily lives."Breaking it up would be wrong, since the essence of what Amazon offers is its potential universality.  For me, shopping on Amazon is almost like what I imagine shopping to be like in a...

The dirty tricks in 1972 were sustained attacks based on faleshoods by the Nixon CREEP against the most popular possible Dem opponent, Sen. Edmund Muskie of Maine, who was finally brought to tears in public, which fatally damaged his campaign, opening the way for George McGovern to get the nomination and take only DC and Massachusetts in the general election.  Today Trump and his many allies, both in Congress and on Fox News, have peddled a false story that Joe Biden fired a Ukrainian...

Today Juan Cole reports from a newspaper in Iraq that since Mohammed al-Allawi has become the new prime minister in Iraq, there has been a meeting in Baghdad between the Russian ambassador and the Iraqi milirary Chief of Staff, and the Iraqi president, Saleh, will be visiting Moscow shortly. A variety of issues and possible areas of cooperation apparently are being discussed, but the biggie apparently is that there is serious discussion of Russia replacing the US in providing air support for...

We have not yet had all the final speechifying where GOP senators attempt to justify their votes to make this the first US federal impeachment trial in history (there have been 15, mostly of judges) not to have any witnesses, as well as the foregone acquittal.  But the battle over how it will be viewed in both the short and medium and long runs is already going on.  A sign of this is a column in yesterday's Washington Post by Hugh Hewitt entitled, "This impeachment charade will fade...

One of the endearing features of Arthur Dahlberg's Job, Machines and Capitalism was its incorporation of an elaborate diagram that illustrated his argument about technology, unemployment, war and shorter working time. A Rube Goldberg machine is a comically complicated contraption designed to perform a simple task. Goldberg began drawing his cartoon machines in 1914 and continued until 1964.A Rube Goldberg Cartoon The economic relationships Dahlberg tried to explain are indeed...

Sometime today, January 30, 2020 the plug will be pulled and the Spitzer Infrared Space Telescope will cease to operate.  It has been in operation since late August, 2003.  It will be succeeded next yeat hopefully be a enew infrared space telescope named for James Webb.Serving as the Chief  Scientist for this telescope has been the main life work of my brother-in-law, Michael W. Werner, who has since 1990 worked on it out of the Jet Propulsion Lab at Caltech.  He had stepped down as its...

With the conclusion of the Trump defense in his impeachment trial, the question arises as to which lie told by the defense is the worst?Sean Hannity has been emphazing four in particular.  In the first he claims that there was no linkage between military aid and investigating Bidens in the July 25 phone transcript.  But there it is in black and white that when Zelensky mentioned wanting more military aid Trump immediately goes to "I need a favor though," with that immediately followed by his...

In his preface to Jobs, Machines and Capitalism, Arthur Dahlberg explained that the economic views upon which his book was based were inspired by his reading of Stephen Leacock's The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice. The latter book's inspiration can be summarized in the sentence, "The economics of war, therefore, has thrown its lurid light upon the economics of peace." Contrary to Frank Knight's dismissive arm-waving about bibliographies and footnotes, Dahlberg did in fact cite two...

Earlier this month the New York Times ran a story about Bellingham, Washington, a picturesque town that looks out across Puget Sound to the San Juan Islands.  Bellingham is home to Western Washington University, but rational thought is in short supply when it comes to climate activism. What got the country’s attention is a proposal before the city council to require all homeowners to switch from natural gas to electric heating by 2040.  A number of cities already require new...

I keep thinking that Fox News cannot get worse, but there seems to be no bottom to how low they can go.  New lows are being exhibited in their coverage of the current Senate impeachment trial.  They are fully involved in covering up the Trump administration coverup of what Trump did regarding the articles of impeachment. Anybody getting their news on this trial from Fox will really have no idea what is going on or what the case is that the House managers of the prosecution are arguing.I am...