EconoSpeak

This is motivated by running on in the econoblogosphere to Trump supporters who when confronted with hard facts they cannot refute revert to name calling that those stating actual facts are suffering from "Trump Derangement Syndrome" (TDS).  I have recently seen it thrown out "liberally."  What is going on here?The beginning of this odd label dates to the George W. Bush era, specifically 2003 when the late Charles Krauthammer, a supporter of W. upset by widespread criticism apparently coined...

Apparently not thr US military."Critical thinking" has long been a buzz phrase of US higher education.  There was a time when I could not hear a speech by a higher administrative person at my or other higher ed institutions that did not tout critical thinking as a really important goal of higher ed.  We were all supposed to be teaching it all the time.  I got a bit tired of these incessant speeches, but in fact I agreed with that and continue to. I have not heard these speeches for some...

Former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, now 99 years old, has written a book, The Making of a Justice: My First 94 Years. Apparently he considers the  District of Columbia versus Heller decision to be the worst of all those that was made during his time on the Supreme Court, that one on  a 5-4 vote.  That decision upended the interpretations of the Second Amendment that had been in place since the amendment was adopted, with Stevens noting that in fact this longstanding...

Rudolf Meidner, one of the unsung economics heroes of the last century, argued for solidarity wages on several grounds, one of which is that low wages subsidize less efficient firms.*  Bring the bottom up, he said, and you will change the mix of enterprises and boost overall productivity.  It’s just a hypothesis, but here’s a bit of recent evidence from a pair of researchers: We study the impact of the minimum wage on firm exit in the restaurant industry, exploiting recent changes in the...

Over a time span of forty-four years, Kenneth Burke wrote a series of four essays beginning with "Waste -- or the Future of Prosperity," published in 1930, and concluding with "Why Satire, With a Plan for Writing One" in 1974. Between those two bookends were "Recipe for Prosperity: 'Borrow. Buy. Waste. Want.,'" in 1956 and "Towards Helhaven: Three Stages of a Vision," in 1971. Burke made explicit the affinity between the four essays in each successive iteration with repeated reference to...

While often on Mondays at the Washington Post, Robert J. Samuelson is spouting VSP lines about how we must be responsible and cut Social Security benefits.  However, today he has written on "What economists don't know," which comes across as a pretty big spanking for economists, among whom he does not make much differentiation.  We are all pretty much as ignorant as each other and just plain not willing to admit it, given that we are also all (actually here he admits not all) trying to "gain...

Amid the blooming flowers of May, each year sees the arrival of the Papers and Proceedings volume of the American Economic Review, containing short and sometimes punchy gleanings from the previous ASSA meetings.  Here are two abstracts of interest.  I haven’t gone through the papers themselves, so I can’t vouch for their methodologies, but the results they claim to have found are politically important.Title: Student Debt and Labor Market Outcomes Authors: Gerald Eric Daniels Jr. and Andria...

I’ve been thinking about alternatives to capitalism for a long time now.  I’ve taught several courses on the topic and plan eventually to write up what I think I’ve learned, so naturally I was intrigued by the new book, The People's Republic of Wal-Mart: How the World's Biggest Corporations Are Laying the Foundation for Socialism (PRW) by Leigh Phillips and Michal Rozworski.  I picked up a copy and started reading it, intending to write a review for this blog.Well, I stopped about a quarter...

Question for Jeff Bezos: Will your orbiting space habitats have Whipping Rooms?

This is one of the last things I was expecting to see happen; that a referendum in Denver would effectively decriminalize magic mushrooms or more specifically the main constituent component of them, the psychedelic drug, psilocybin.  But this has happened in the Mile High City, if by a narrow margin.  I largely welcome this.  After all, it has always been sort of ridiculous to arrest someone for owning a naturally growing mushroom, especially one known to grow especially in cowpies.This gets...