Tag Archives: politics

(Dan here…better late than not!) by New Deal democrat A better name for The Kids Today: iGeneration You know the drill. It’s Sunday so I get to ruminate about all stuff that isn’t dry economics. The oldest member of the Millennial generation is 38. Not only do I not think that The Kids Today would want to be lumped with that age group, but their uncool parents are probably precisely members of that group! So what to name the generation that came after...

by Jeff Soplop What Happened to the Political Price for Lying? (Part 2) Recently I wrote about the political price of lying and how there is a serious disconnect between voters (including republican voters) saying they want honesty in a politician and how they act. My initial conclusion was that many voters are lying to themselves and so, consequently, end up lying to pollsters. With this in mind, the next question is this: just how dishonest are voters...

Low response rates are a problem for pollsters. The worst problem is candidate specific response bias in which supporters of one candidate are more likely to respond than supporters of another. This can make polls worthless. It is interested to the other very hard problem of predicting who will actually vote. I am thinking of something a friend told me about 2012. Obama’s support dropped dramatically after the first debate (and this is clearer with...

by Jeff Soplop What Happened to the Political Price for Lying? (Part one of two) James Comey’s recent interview on ABC has resurrected questions about the importance of honesty in public officials. One of the key themes of Comey’s interview, and apparently his soon-to-be-released book, is that Donald Trump is “morally unfit” to be president because, among other things, he lies constantly. Certainly Comey’s statements reflect a broad public despair about...

Steve Hutkins of Save the Post Office blog also reviewed the WSJ/Citigroup analysis of the Amazon – USPS agreement in the second half of his article, “Fake News, Flawed Analysis, and Bogus Tweets,” April 8 on Angry Bear. As noted in the first half on Steve’s article presented at Angry Bear; Trump’s tweet about the Postal Service undercharging Amazon by $1.50 per parcel is based on a July 2017 Wall Street Journal article undercharging Amazon was based on...

The OM Wiener award goes to House Speaker Paul Ryan. Paul Ryan can’t just leave, go home, and check with Oscar Mayer to see if he can still drive the OM Wiener Mobile again like he did as a college student. Naaaw, instead he is threating baby boomers with making them pay again for their SS. Ryan: “The one thing I obviously care a great deal about is entitlement reform and in particular health care entitlement reform,” To put it into Randian language, the...

I am posting this NPR Fresh Air radio article here because it talks about a part of our society that has not been talked about much.  When it comes to discussion of taxation, social programs, how our economy works, the basic premise of free market misses an awful lot. From the page: For many poor families in America, eviction is a real and ongoing threat. Sociologist Matthew Desmond estimates that 2.3 million evictions were filed in the U.S. in 2016 — a...

Unresolved Issues In Happiness Economics From The Conference Honoring The Retirement Of The Field’s Founder That would be Richard A. Easterlin, age 92, retiring this spring from the U. of Southern California after being there since 1981, following an earlier stint at U. of Penn, where he got his PhD under Simon Kuznets.  Kuznets in turn got his from Wesley Clair Mitchell, who was in turn the student of Thorstein Veblen, and it was mentioned (by me...

When we published our latest book – Reclaiming the State: A Progressive Vision of Sovereignty for a Post-Neoliberal World – last September, Thomas Fazi and I approached the UK Guardian to see if they would publish an Op Ed by us summarising the main arguments presented in the book. We received no response. Pluto tell us that the book is one of their better sellers since it was published. And it is not as if the topic is irrelevant in the Guardian’s assessment. That is clear from the fact...

Pseudo-Equity: Further Remarks on the Politics of Mandatory Diversity Training at Evergreen This post follows the previous one and explains why I get so exercised about the politics of equity at a place like Evergreen State College.  The single issue at the heart of activism at Evergreen for the past two years is mandatory diversity training for faculty.  This was first proposed by the Equity Council (which was set up by the college administration and...