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(Dan here….written last year, still relevent) By Steve Roth  (originally published at Evonomics) Bernie Sanders and Chuck Schumer’s New York Times op-ed, “Limit Corporate Stock Buybacks,” has thrown internet gasoline on the buyback debate. The left is waving the flag, and the right is trying to tear it down. The core Sanders/Schumer argument: buybacks extract money from firms, money that could be used to pay workers more, and fund productive investment...

If there’s one reliable constant in Australian economic policy debate it’s that Judith Sloan and I will be on opposite side. However, she’s picked up my idea of a nuclear “grand bargain”, with the rather striking claim that the carbon price side of the deal is already done Interestingly, professor John Quiggin, a left-wing economist, has given his blessing to the introduction of nuclear power in Australia. He does this on the condition that a carbon price also be introduced,...

In 1980 the bottom 50% of the population in the US received 20% of the national income and 23% in Western Europe. By 2016 the share of the bottom 50% of the US population received declined to 13% while in Western Europe the bottom 50% held on to 22% of the national income. The top 1% in Western Europe increased their share to 12% in 2016. Meanwhile in the US the top 1%increased their share of the national income from 10% in 1980 to 20% in 2016. A key question is what policies and forces...

September JOLTS report: mixed with “hard” positives and a “soft” negative This morning’s JOLTS report for September was mixed, with a decline in job openings and an increase in layoffs, but advances in hiring and voluntary quits. To review, because this series is only 20 years old, we only have one full business cycle to compare. During the 2000s expansion: Hires peaked first, from December 2004 through September 2005 Quits peaked next, in September...

from Lars Syll Coupled with downright incompetence in statistics, we often find the syndrome that I have come to call statisticism: the notion that computing is synonymous with doing research, the naïve faith that statistics is a complete or sufficient basis for scientific methodology, the superstition that statistical formulas exist for evaluating such things as the relative merits of different substantive theories or the “importance” of  the causes of a “dependent variable”; and the...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:CO2_emissions_per_capita,_2017_(Our_World_in_Data).svg

from David Ruccio Across American universities, corporations, and financial institutions, researchers are honing computer models designed to predict the winner in the November 2020 presidential election in which Donald Trump will face a Democratic candidate still to be determined. One such set of models, developed by Moody’s Analytics, which focuses on the electoral college (and not the national popular vote), predicts a convincing victory for Trump. Moody’s based its projections on...

from Lars Syll Back in 1991, when yours truly earned his first PhD​ with a dissertation on decision-making and rationality in social choice theory and game theory, I concluded that “repeatedly it seems as though mathematical tractability and elegance — rather than realism and relevance — have been the most applied guidelines for the behavioural assumptions being made. On a political and social level, ​it is doubtful if the methodological individualism, ahistoricity and formalism those...

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