EconoSpeak

I am referring to a comment Sean Hannity made on his show earlier this evening in his monologue. The reports tht  President Trump was under  invesdtigation by FBI Counterintelligence as being a possible "Russian asset" supposedly taking orders from Vladimir Putin has pusheed uber Trump defender Hannity to ever more surreal forms of defense, in this case one especially bizarre given the cloase association in Trump's early career between him and Roy Cohn, the lead attorney for the late...

The big news in New York City is that the Chrysler Building is for sale: New York City's iconic Chrysler Building has appeared in dozens of movies and remained an Art Deco jewel of the Manhattan skyline for decades. Now, the 89-year-old skyscraper can be yours. Located on 42nd Street just east of Grand Central Terminal, sale price estimates for the famed Chrysler Building vary, but its majority owners, the Abu Dhabi Investment Council, hope to recoup the $800 million it paid for their stake...

In the world of urban politics, there is probably no more potent populist rallying cry than the demand to halt gentrification.  Activists have fought it on multiple fronts: zoning, development subsidies, permitting, rent control—every lever housing policies afford.  But what if they’re mistaking cause for effect, hacking away at the visible manifestations of the problem while leaving the problem itself intact?Pivot to an important article in today’s New York Times, reporting on recent...

An issue so far not openly addressed in this "Partial Shutdown" situation is that those who have been deemed to be "essential," are now working without pay, even though we all believe that they will eventually receive their overdue backpay.  I really do not know the  law that says that thesee people must work without being paid within a reasnable time period of their work, but  my basic view of  this is that people being forced to woork without being paid in a clearly established time period...

As an example of "The Paranoid Style in American Politics," Richard Hofstadter cited the 1964 Senate testimony of a witness who had driven all the way from Bagdad, Arizona to denounce the regulation of interstate shipment of firearms as "a further attempt by a subversive power to make us part of one world socialistic government." According to the witness, Dr. William Gorder, the proposed Dodd bill would "create chaos which can only aid our enemies." Dr. Gorder further expounded on the theme...

In 2007 Naomi Klein got quite a bit of attention and mostly favorable comment for her  book, Shock Doctrine.  It promulgated that global elites used periods of crisis around the world to force damaging neoliberal policies derived from the Chicago School and Washington Consensus upon unhappy populations that suffered greatly as a result.  This was "shock therapy" that was more like destructive electroshock than any sort of therapy.  There is a lot of truth to this argument, and it highlighted...

Donald Winnicott develops the concept of transitional objects in a fairly short, remarkably lucid, engaging and, in my view, extremely important paper titled "Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena." There is no reason not to read it and thus there is no reason for me to go into a pedantic rehash of Winnicott's argument.In a nutshell, Winnicott is dealing specifically with the objects -- such as a soft toy or a piece of blanket -- that infants adopt as a substitute for the illusion...

I am back from the annual ASSA/AEA meetings in Atlanta.  I learned a new term that on checking I find has been around for about five years. It is "econogenic," coined by George DeMartino, who spoke on this in a session on "Ethics and Economics" held by the Association for Social Economics. It means "harm done by economists," and it is inspired by "iatrogenic," referring to harm done by physicians.  His talk focused on this and claims that the medical profession  is 50 years ahead of the...

I am not somebody who makes endo/beginning of year predictions, and I am not about to stsrt now.  But I have just read a guest post by Jeffrey Frankel on Econbrowser where he brags about making six accurate predictions for 2018 while not reporting on some others he made that did not work out so well.  I happened to largely agree with them when I saw him making them, with some questions on two, while myself quitely making some that failed to come true.  I shall comment.Frankel's six...

When I first started arguing against the degrowthers, I thought they were a small, uninfluential fringe, important only because they had a sway over a portion of the left—what we might call the Naomi Klein left.  That was then.  Today degrowth is entering the mainstream, as can be seen by the latest David Roberts piece in Vox.  Roberts reviews a discussion between several economists on the Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET) website.  (INET is a Soros-affiliated outfit whose mission...