Tag Archives: Uncategorized

The Guardian has been running some articles on the long-delayed Inland Rail project, proposed to carry freight between Melbourne and Brisbane (or possibly, if Barnaby Joyce has his way) Melbourne and Gladstone. Apart from the usual megaproject problems of delays, cost overruns, mid-project redesigns and so on, there appears to be a fundamental and unfixable conflict in the thinking behind the project. To have any prospect of economic success, the rail line has to get a large share...

from Maria Alejandra Madi and WEA Pedagogy Blog Hayek proposed the abolition of the government’s monopoly on the issuance of fiat money in his book “Denationalisation of Money: The Argument Refined” (1976). In reality, his support for a complete privatization of the money supply stemmed from his dissatisfaction with the management of central banks, which, in his opinion, had been heavily influenced by political considerations. As a result, the ultimate goal of Hayek’s denationalisation of...

from Lars Syll Breaking news! Using advanced multiple nonlinear regression models similar to those in recent news stories on alcohol and dairy and more than 3.6M observations from 1997 through 2012, I have found that drinking more causes people to turn into men! Across people drinking 0-7 drinks per day, each drink per day causes the drinker’s probability of being a man to increase by 10.02 percentage points (z=302.2, p<0.0001). Need I say, profound implications for public health...

from Nat Dyer Famously, Queen Elizabeth II asked professors at the London School of Economics (LSE) in 2008 why they did not notice the crisis coming. The moment has become a founding story of ‘new economics’. In the aftermath, the net was cast wide to catch those who did anticipate parts of the crisis. Many names have been put forward including Dean Baker, Steve Keen, Nouriel Roubini, Ann Pettifor, Raghuram Rajan, and Hyman Minsky. But, a name that’s missing from virtually every list was...

The era of zero real interest rates (for savers) makes all sorts of calculations simpler. I started looking at the choice between electric vehicles (EVs) and comparable cars with internal combustion engines (ICE) and ran into a bunch of issues about depreciation, time horizons, resale values and so on. But there’s one way of making the comparison very simple. Consider someone who buys a car for cash and drives it until its value reaches zero and it is scrapped. (For the moment,...

As usual, 26 January has been marked by protests, denunciations of those protests, and further iterations. Even apart from the fact that it marks an invasion, the foundation of a colony that later became one of Australia’s states isn’t much of a basis for a national day. A logical choice would be the day our Federation came into force. Unfortunately for this idea, our Founders chose 1 Jan 1901. The first day of the 20th century[1] must have seemed like an auspicious choice for a...

from Dean Baker The news media have been constantly hyping inflation in recent months. While everyone has been seeing the huge rise in gas prices over the last year (that’s what happens when the world reopens after a pandemic), used car prices have risen almost as rapidly. From December 2020 to December 2021 they rose 37.3 percent. This accounted for 1.03 percentage points of the 7.0 percent overall inflation in the last year. We know the story of these price increases. A fire in a...

from Lars Syll Piketty argues that the higher income share of wealth-owners is due to an increase in the capital-output ratio resulting from a high rate of capital accumulation. The evidence suggests just the contrary. The capital-output ratio, as conventionally measured has either fallen or been constant in recent decades. The apparent increase in the capital-output ratio identified by Piketty is a valuation effect reflecting a disproportionate increase in the market value of certain...

Angry Bear continues to make the Top 100 Economics Blogs from Intelligent Economist and Top 100 Economics Blogs and Websites from Feedspot (now for 2022). Econospeak (Barkley Rosser, pgl, Peter Dorman, Tom Walker) is in the financial section along with  Bonddad blog (New Deal democrat) and  Capital Ebbs and Flows (Joseph Joyce), and I am proud to say have a direct connection to Angry Bear (under general blogs…). Eric Kramer and Ken Melvin have...