EconoSpeak

Here we go again.  We have arrived at the time for the release of the annual Social Security Administration (SSA) report.  It got the usual headlines across the media, that the SSA will "run out of money" in 2034. Most of the stories played it all scary, although noting that after the system will still pay 3/4 of what it was.  But, of course, Congress can act now to fix the system the stories say, leaving it vague what that would amount to.  Two points on this.The first is that basically...

I’m reading another article about debates over free speech on campus, this time at Williams College, an elite school in the northwestern corner of Massachusetts.  A faculty petition asks to formalize and tighten the college’s policy on free speech by adopting the Chicago Principles, which state that “concerns about civility and mutual respect can never be used as a justification for closing off discussion of ideas, however offensive or disagreeable those ideas may be to some members of our...

Just as Ulysses had himself chained to the mast of his ship so he wouldn’t succumb to the lure of the Sirens, John Ionnidis and others have argued we must bind ourselves to the discipline of statistical significance lest we fall victim to confirmation bias.  Some researchers will want to proclaim they have found earth-shaking results even if they are enveloped in noise, and others will try to dismiss genuine findings of no effect, even if that is where the data point.  The only way...

US SecState Pompeo announced early today that the waivers granted to 8 nations allowing them to continue to import oil from Iran will not bee renewed when they expire in early May.  I am not sure of the identity of three of those nations, but the big five are China, India, Japan, South Korea, and Turkey.  None of them have made any public statement so far, nor has Iran.  It has been announced that Saudi Arabia and the UAE and maybe also Iraq will increase oil production to offset this,...

No, not Vladimir V. Putin.  He was born on October 7, 1952, although I can understand how any reader might assume it was him, given that he has just had a great victory with the Mueller Report "exonerating" his fan boy in the White House from engaging in criminal conspiracy with him, much less getting on fan boy's case too seriously over his repeated lies and attempts to obstruct justice, allowing VVP to return to overtly lying by denying that Russia had anything to do with the 2016...

Tracey Samuelson of Market Place writes: USMCA would slightly boost U.S. economy, says ITC report - On Thursday, the International Trade Commission released its assessment of the projected economic impact of USMCA, President Trump's proposed replacement for NAFTA. The report shows the new deal is projected to boost the U.S. economy by .35% when fully implemented. I will to read this report after I get over laughing at the latest from Menzie Chinn who quotes Kevin Hassett: Two-thirds of...

On March 25, Matt Taibbi wrote in Rolling Stone: On Sunday, Attorney General William Barr sent a letter to Congress, summarizing the findings of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation. The most telling section, quoted directly from Mueller’s report, read: “[T]he investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.” That one sentence should end a roughly 33-month...

The Trump crowd has long claimed that there was "no collusion, " repeatedly in many venues.  Somehow the MSM picked up on this screed, and so it is out there that indeed that the Mueller Report  declared that there was "no collusion," a phrase that somehow Trump himself long put out there for his followers long before the Mueller Report came out. But, in fact up front in the Mueller Report they made it clear that they were not  investigating "collusion." They only briefly discussed the term,...

Associated with the UN Convention on the Rights of Children is a Universal Childrens' Day.  It is November 20, the date that in 1959 the UN adopted the first version of the Convention, which had 10 articles.  It is celebrated in many nations, but not in the US.A competitor is International Childrens' Day, also called the International Day for the Protection of  Children.  This is June 1 and was declared in Moacow in 1950.  It is also widely celebrated, mostly in former or current socialist...

After Peter Dorman's latest post this seems appropriate to follow up.  Very recently I was at a talk where somebody spoke on the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child.  A theme of the talk was how few Americans know about this UN Convention while most reasonably well informed people in virtually the entire rest of the world know about it.  A first version of it was passed  by the UN in 1959.  A second round was in 1989.  I do not know what the US's position was on the first...