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The Bank of England has a 28 MB Excel dataset containing: “A millenium of macro economic data”. A treasure trove. A good thing about it: as it are long term series and as these are roughly based on national accounts data and not just on economics 101 it’s not only focused on GDP but also on sectoral developments and flows between and within sectors. I can’t show it all, and… will leave, to name only one (!) major part of it, the Flow of Funds data, which, among other things, show...

from Blair Fix As 2021 comes to a close, I’m having a distinct sense of déjà vu. A year ago, I wrote a post celebrating COVID vaccines as a triumph of science. And I noted that vaccine discovery is a collective endeavour. The cumulative number of major vaccines tracks closely with the cumulative number of scientific papers, a bellwether for humanity’s collective knowledge. Here’s the trend: Figure 1: The cumulative number of major vaccines tracks with the cumulative number of scientific...

from Dean Baker From the way our policy types talk about patents, or refuse to talk about them, they must think that the constitution guarantees life, liberty, and people getting incredibly rich from patents. Even as this pandemic has been needlessly prolonged by patent restrictions on the spread of technology for vaccines, tests, and treatments, resulting in millions of preventable deaths, we are still seeing no real debate as to whether we want to rely on these monopolies as a primary...

As I indicated in my previous post about self-driving vehicles, I’m trying to think more about where I’ve gone wrong in my analysis of current issues and trends, hoping to improve. I got some useful comments on that issue, though nothing directly applicable to my bigger predictive failures The most important such failure has concerned the future of democracy, where my views were characterized by clearly unjustifiable optimism (see here and here). I’ve now shifted to extreme...

from Lars Syll Statistical mechanics reasoning may be applicable in the economic and social sciences, but only if adequate consideration is paid to the specific contexts and conditions of its application. This requires attention to “non-mechanical” processes of interaction, inflected by power, culture, institutions etc., and therefore of specific histories which gives rise to these factors … Outside of very specific cases, statistical physics is more likely to provide useful metaphors and...

by New Deal democrat Weekly Indicators for December 13 – 17 at Seeking Alpha [Brief programming note: this coming week will only see existing home sales on Wednesday, and new home sales plus jobless claims on Thursday. In other words – don’t be surprised if I take a couple of days off. Omicron permitting] My Weekly Indicators post is up at Seeking Alpha. While the large majority of the strictly economic data continues positive in all...

from Lars Syll A couple of years ago, former chairman of the Fed, Alan Greenspan, wrote in an article in the Financial Times, re the increased demands for stronger regulation of banks and finance: Since the devastating Japanese earthquake and, earlier, the global financial tsunami, governments have been pressed to guarantee their populations against virtually all the risks exposed by those extremely low probability events. But should they? Guarantees require the building up of a buffer of...