EconoSpeak

Noah Smith has a lot of praise for the economic policy proposals from Elizabeth Warren. I’ll mention only one: With costs for shelter eating a bigger piece of Americans' paychecks, and local government paralyzed by incumbent homeowners, the country needs a big solution. Warren's would combine incentives for raising zoning density with increased public construction”. This is interesting in light of John Cochrane’s rant attacking the Democrats on the housing issue. Read it for yourself....

According to nkecon, on April 30 the price of rice in the DPRK was 4070 won per kg, but as of June 25 it had risen 26 percent to 5147 won per kg, the highest in many years.  The price of corn has also sharply risen although not quite as high abovee recent levels as has the price of rice.  However, the price of pork has fallen, reflecting standard corn-hog relations, and per capita incomes appear to have fallen.  Crop failures have now been passing through to consumers in higher prices.And in...

The Times thinks it’s leading the forces of reason and light against Donald Trump, but it doesn’t have a clue.  Every day their front page is festooned with the latest noxious Trumpian remark, followed by paragraphs of commentary on how unprecedented it is for a president to talk this way and how appalled most politicians and political observers are.  They think Trump is making one mistake after another, and if their readers are exposed to the whole lot of them, they will turn against the...

At 3PM EDT on Friday, I’ll be watching the coverage via Fox of our great women’s soccer team playing the host team in Paris. It is only the quarterfinals of the World Cup and yet this may be the game of the entire match. Unfortunately the Idiot in Chief has been writing a lot of insulting tweets: President Donald Trump has invited the U.S. women's soccer team to the White House, regardless of whether they win the World Cup, after Megan Rapinoe's assertion that she is "not going to the...

I do not know, which is a kind of silly way to start a post, but pretty obviously this is an opening to talk about some other matters, especially the US-Iran situation.  However, I want to point out some things  that have been on my mind.  In particular, while oil price volatility has not been super extreme recently compared to some movements in the last decade and a half, the degree of uncertainty and confusion about what is going on in the oil markets has become extreme.  This is heavily a...

Today I endured listening to Arthur Laffer lie serially to Ali Velshi today. Skip the first 36 minutes of this Youtube as the interview begins there. Never mind the praise for Laffer’s cheerleading for Trump. Laffer actually claimed that the FED’s low interest rates after the Great Recession began was the cause of the Great Recession. OK! But then he pivots and advocates we should have low interest rates now that Trump is President. I know – WTF?! OK – don’t trust Laffer on monetary policy...

Yesterday Facebook released a While Paper (https://libra.org.en-US/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2019/06/LibraWhitePaper_en_US.pdf ) on their planned supposed cryptocurrency, Libra, which has apparently long been under development.  This triggered two stories in the New York Times, as well as lots of commentary by lots of people, including several posts by Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution, who is moderately favorable to the proposal.  This is supposed to become an international currency...

Yesterday I learned that the person who first used the term "duality" in connection with linear programming, indeed with anything in economics, was John von Neumann in a private conversation with George Dantzig in 1947, the "father of linear programming."  That was the year Dantzig published his paper showing the simplex method for solving linear programming problems, bot their primals and their  duals.  Von Neumann wrote a paper on it the same year but did not publish it, with it only...

Yeah, I know, the Iran situation is more in the headlines, but nobody knows anything and everybody is shooting off their mouths.  I shall comment on that one when things settle down a bit.Instead I shall provide info less widely reported coming out of nkecon on the still-unreported-in-MSM story about the increasingly bad food situation in North Korea (DPRK). There are multiple reports.  Drought has hit the principal rice growing area in DPRK.  Also, there is now a serious situation regarding...

I want to follow Dean Baker in dumping on the Robert J. Samuelson Monday, 9/11/19 WaPo column on "The Democrats' fairy-tale campaigns."  He may be right that lots of proposals have been put forward with no clear accounting of how much all of them will cost, but RJS also fails to recognize some might save money, such as a properly structured universal health care program that might move us more towards the costs we see in other nations.  Of course, RJS regularly uses this column to call for...