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from Norbert Häring Ten years ago, the Rockefeller Foundation published the eerily prescient, autocratic Lock-Step-Scenario and, apparently, has been working to make it true. The most recent initiative in this regard is a cooperation of the Rockefeller-funded GAVI immunization alliance with Mastercard and a biometric ID company named TrustStamp. Before getting to this cooperation, let me briefly remind you of a selection of the assumptions of the Lock Step scenario builders have made...

from David Ruccio Since the first of June,Lost my job and lost my room.I pretend to try,Even though I tried alone. — Sufian Stevens, “Flint (For the Unemployed and Underpaid)” Yesterday morning, the U.S. Department of Labor (pdf) reported that, during the week ending last Saturday, another 1.3 million American workers filed initial claims for unemployment compensation. That’s on top of the 48.7 million workers who were laid off during the preceding fifteen weeks. Here is a breakdown of...

from Lars Syll The atomic hypothesis which has worked so splendidly in Physics breaks down in Psychics. We are faced at every turn with the problems of Organic Unity, of Discreteness, of Discontinuity – the whole is not equal to the sum of the parts, comparisons of quantity fails us, small changes produce large effects, the assumptions of a uniform and homogeneous continuum are not satisfied. Thus the results of Mathematical Psychics turn out to be derivative, not fundamental, indexes,...

  by New Deal democrat Weekly Indicators for July 6 – 10 at Seeking Alpha My Weekly Indicators post is up at Seeking Alpha. While the forecasts remain inexplicably positive, the nowcast worsened slightly. As usual, clicking over and reading should bring you up to the moment on the economy, and will also reward me ever so slightly for my work.

from Dean Baker I have written many times that I thought the focus on wealth inequality, as opposed to income inequality, was misplaced. There are many practical, political, and legal problems associated with taxing wealth that are considerably smaller when we talk about altering the economic structures that redistribute so much income upward. But beyond the issue of whether inequalities of income or wealth are more easily tackled, there is also a very strange argument for focusing on...

from Peter Radford The economy as a sea of information, constantly churning, far from equilibrium, with computation its key activity.  It is complex.  It is inscrutable to any method that fails to accommodate its multitude of layers, interconnections, feedback loops, and constant dynamism.  Since reading Ilya Prigogine ages ago I have never understood how anyone could not view the economy through such a lens.  The interplay between creative forces needed to sustain life and the constant...

I was due to appear tomorrow before the Environment and Planning Committee’s inquiry into Nuclear Prohibition in Victoria, but I’ve just been advised that it’s been deferred until after the lockdown. I’d just finished writing a supplement to my earlier submission which concluded that there was no real support for the kind of ‘grand bargain’ I’d earlier proposed, combining a commitment to a rapid phase-out of coal with a removal of the prohibition on nuclear power. It’s over the fold....

from Robert Wade and RWER issue no.92 The bottom line is that North and South are coherent blocs in important ways. The income gap between the North-South blocs is – persistently – larger than the income gaps within them. If we plot the share of world population living in countries arranged by average income we see a pronounced bimodal distribution, with not much population in between. Countries of the North enjoy common economic benefits from their superior position in the world...

Fred Zimmerman  (originally a comment) Taken together, the chapters of Anthropologies of Unemployment, New Perspectives on Work and Its Absence, edited by Jong Bum Kwon and Carrie M. Laneby reveal that there is something new about unemployment today. It is not a temporary occurrence, but a chronic condition. In adjusting to persistent, longstanding unemployment, people and groups create new understandings of unemployment as well as of work and employment; they improvise new forms of...

from Lars Syll Econometricians typically hail the evolution of econometrics as a “big success”. For example, Geweke et al. (2006) argue that “econometrics has come a long way over a relatively short period” … Pagan (1987) describes econometrics as “outstanding success” because the work of econometric theorists has become “part of the process of economic investigation and the training of economists” … These claims represent no more than self-glorifying rhetoric … The widespread use of...