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Just before Christmas, I published a piece in The Interpreter (Lowy Institute) arguing that most of the claims made by the contending parties in the South China Sea are myths designed to promote the interests of nationalists and militarists in a variety of countries, including Australia. Final paras The mutual sabre-rattling associated with South China Sea mythology is beneficial to a variety of actors in the United States, China and elsewhere. The military-industrial complex,...

Write about your hopes, fears, predictions for the coming year. Usual comment rules apply. I’m going to be cracking down hard on snark this year, so if you’re in any doubt about your response to another commenter, don’t post it. Share this:Like this:Like Loading...

from Peter Radford Let’s stir things up for the New Year by continuing with one of my recent themes. A quote from an opinion piece in the NYT this morning [January 3rd]: “James Madison boasted that the Constitution achieved “the total exclusion of the people, in their collective capacity.” Its elaborate political mechanics reflect the elite dislike and mistrust of majority rule that Madison voiced when he wrote, “Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates, every Athenian assembly would...

from Lars Syll

by New Deal democrat Weekly Indicators for December 27 – 31 at Seeking Alpha The last edition of Weekly Indicators for 2021 is up at Seeking Alpha. I have been watching restaurant reservations for the first signs of the economic impact of Omicron. Well . . . . Additionally, interest rates are hitting an important milestone this week, that is changing some of their ratings, and with that the reading of the long leading forecast. As...

from Lars Syll One of the limitations with economics is the restricted possibility to perform experiments, forcing it to mainly rely on observational studies for knowledge of real-world economies. But still — the idea of performing laboratory experiments holds a firm grip of our wish to discover (causal) relationships between economic ‘variables.’If we only could isolate and manipulate variables in controlled environments, we would probably find ourselves in a situation where we with...

from Shimshon Bichler and Jonathan Nitzan If you thought that oil profits are about producing oil, think again. The enclosed chart, updated from our 2015 Real-World Economics Review paper, ‘Still About Oil?’, shows that the main determinant of oil profit — and specifically of differential oil profit — is not output, but prices. The figure shows the correlation between two series: (1) the differential oil profits of the world’s integrated oil companies, computed as the ratio between their...

That’s the headline for a story based on an email interview I did with Yahoo News. Over the fold, the full Q and A. What are your predictions for NSW given the current numbers?Assuming that Hazzard’s 25 000 cases a day estimate is correct, that 2 per cent  are hospitalised and and average stay of 10 days, that’s 5000 people in hospital on any given day. NSW has 20700 hospital beds, so almost 25 per cent taken up with Covid What will this mean for hospitals?This will clearly...