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A National Emergency Believe It or Not Version, The Hill, Republican Congressional Representative Andy Bigg It is hard to believe someone would write this stuff with any degree of being serious. This is why it should be reprinted as this Representative is an idiot. “In this time of stasis in Congress and a national security crisis at the border, the president should strongly consider declaring a national emergency on the border and temporarily diverting a...

A new sandpit for long side discussions, conspiracy theories, idees fixes and so on. Like this:Like Loading...

from Lars Syll Empirically, far from isolating a microeconomic core, real-business-cycle models, as with other representative-agent models, use macroeconomic aggregates for their testing and estimation. Thus, to the degree that such models are successful in explaining empirical phenomena, they point to the ontological centrality of macroeconomic and not to microeconomic entities … At the empirical level, even the new classical representative-agent models are fundamentally macroeconomic in...

from Dean Baker and WEA Commentaries Okay, it’s that time of year when we are all supposed to commit ourselves to performing nearly impossible tasks over the next twelve months. I will play the game. Here is the list of areas where I will try to bring economics into economic policy debates in 2019. 1) Patent and copyright monopolies are government policies: This one is pretty simple, but that doesn’t mean it is easy. It should be pretty obvious that these and other forms of intellectual...

by New Deal democrat Weekly Indicators for January 6 – 10 at Seeking Alpha My Weekly Indicators post is up at Seeking Alpha. Recent gyrations have changed both the short and long term forecast. Once again, it shows that the biggest problem is that most forecasters simply project existing trends forward. As usual, reading the article should be informative for you, and helps reward me with a little pocket change for my efforts....

Solid social science on the opinion pages (needless to say news reporters consider interest in randomized controlled experiments to be opinion. Christian Caryl explains how it is possible to determine the effect of the Russian influence campaign on the 2016 presidential election. Sinan Aral, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology [skip] says he and his colleagues want to study the Russian influence campaign in precisely this...

from Maria Alejandra Madi A decade after the 2008 global crisis, some key trends can be highlighted: a) There has been a shift to defined contribution (DC) pension plans, b) The increasing role of alternative assets, such as private equity, among pension assets. Many governments in OCDE countries have been committed to structural reforms in labour markets and pension plans. As a result, the current era of austerity has deep impacts on the diversification of types of pension plans....

This is an almost semi serious proposal suggesting payday lenders could get good publicity. There are many entities with plenty of spare cash. The US Treasury isn’t one of them. I think that the good publicity gained by offering zero interest loans to unpaid federal employees is worth the cost. They are good credit risks because they will get paid (without interest) eventually. I’d say some entity with spare liquidity could help the country and win...

from yesterday’s New York Times The economics profession is facing a mounting crisis of sexual harassment, discrimination and bullying that women in the field say has pushed many of them to the sidelines — or out of the field entirely. Those issues took center stage at the American Economic Association’s annual meeting, the largest gathering of the profession, last weekend in Atlanta. Spurred by substantiated allegations of harassment against one of the most prominent young economists in...