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by New Deal Democrat Weekly Indicators for July 15 – 19 at Seeking Alpha My Weekly Indicators post is up at Seeking Alpha. There were a number a changes among the short leading indicators this week at the margins, in a somewhat surprising direction. Since I’ll be posting my semi-annual updates of my short and long term forecasts over the next week or two, there is a lot for me to think about! Anyway, as usual, clicking over and reading should be...

Back in 2004, I wrote that There is only one real instance of political correctness in Australia today and that is that you are never, ever allowed to call anyone a racist. It’s OK to say that Adolf Hitler was a racist, and that apartheid was racist, but the idea that any actual Australian could be a racist is utterly taboo. Of course, the same was true in the US. But after two and a half years of an openly racist Trump Presidency in the US, the taboo seems finally to be open to...

from Lars Syll In my judgment, the practical usefulness of those modes of inference, here termed Universal and Statistical Induction, on the validity of which the boasted knowledge of modern science depends, can only exist—and I do not now pause to inquire again whether such an argument must be circular—if the universe of phenomena does in fact present those peculiar characteristics of atomism and limited variety which appear more and more clearly as the ultimate result to which material...

from Asad Zaman Last semester I taught an MMT-based Macro course which attempted to re-integrate history into economics. The course was based on the premise that economic theories cannot be understood outside the historical context in which they were born. Standard graduate macro courses attempt to teach a body of theory which has been empirically falsified. My course had the goal of giving the student the ability to understand major economic events of the past century.  A previous post...

This is my oldest son the weekend of the Apollo moon landing. The whole country was glued to their TVs that week. Figure 1 The TV was about the state of the art 50 years ago and my brother, the photo journalist, took the photo.  In  the pre-digital era he mostly worked in black and white.

from Ikonoclast Conventional economics is a prescriptive discipline pretending to be a descriptive discipline. I find it useful, at a first principles level of thinking, to distinguish between “rules” and “laws”. (1) A “rule” is a prescribed guide for conduct or action by any agent (human or machine). (2) A “law” is a fundamental law of (physical) nature described by the hard sciences after extensive observation, experiment, deduction and mathematical analysis. A “rule” is made in a given...

from Lars Syll Mathematical statistician David Freedman‘s Statistical Models and Causal Inference (Cambridge University Press, 2010)  and Statistical Models: Theory and Practice (Cambridge University Press, 2009) are marvellous books. They ought to be mandatory reading for every serious social scientist — including economists and econometricians — who doesn’t want to succumb to ad hocassumptions and unsupported statistical conclusions! How do we calibrate the uncertainty introduced by...

from Jamie Margolin and The Guardian Many people trace the origins of today’s climate crisis to the Industrial Revolution, when humans first began to burn large amounts of coal, but the crisis’s true roots extend further back to the onset of colonialism. When European colonizers ventured to Africa, Asia, North and South America, they invariably plundered the local natural resources, damaged habitats, hunted species to extinction and often forced human inhabitants into slavery....

Well by attacking the group Trump got the press to completely forget about the refugees on the southern border. You would think that after all this time the media would learn to deal with his misdirection.