Tag Archives: Uncategorized

from David Ruccio This is the first in a series of blog posts on the utopian dimensions of healthcare. I’ve written quite a bit about the U.S. healthcare dystopia over the years—including a seven-part series back in 2016.* But I haven’t yet addressed the utopian dimensions of healthcare reform. The appearance of the new issue of Jacobin Magazine, titled “The Health of Nations,”  is a good occasion to start that discussion. Adam Gaffney starts with much the same question that provoked my...

Interest rates and jobs: a variation on the model Friday is nonfarm payrolls day, so in the absence more noteworthy economic news, let me follow up on Monday’s post in which I discussed “A simple model of interest rates and the jobs market.” In it, I suggested that: 1. a YoY increase in the Fed funds rate equal to the YoY% change in job growth has in the past almost infallibly been correlated with a recession within roughly 12 months. 2. the YoY...

from Lars Syll Because I was there when the economics department of my university got an IBM 360, I was very much caught up in the excitement of combining powerful computers with economic research. Unfortunately, I lost interest in econometrics almost as soon as I understood how it was done. My thinking went through four stages: 1. Holy shit! Do you see what you can do with a computer’s help. 2. Learning computer modeling puts you in a small class where only other members of the caste...

As taken from the comments section. EMichael’s commentary on temperature and its impact. Interesting. “Air conditioning has changed demographics, too. It’s hard to imagine the rise of cities like Dubai or Singapore without it. As residential units spread rapidly across America in the second half of the 20th century, the population in the “sun belt” – the warmer south of the country, from Florida to California – boomed from 28% of Americans to 40%. As...

Hi folks…I am in a next town over at a friends and am online again.   Am also thinking getting a generator due to changes in climate….:)

from Malgorzata Dereniowska That economics is a value-laden science is not a new idea. Most of the prominent economic thinkers were also philosophers, wary of moral and philosophical content of scientific assumptions, models, and theories. That economics needs philosophy, and the separation between these two cannot be maintained any longer, is gaining recognition, and has become a subject of debates in the field of philosophy of economics that brings together (to various extends)...

WEA Commentaries Formerly the World Economics Association NewsletterVolume 8, Issue No. 1  Download the issue as a PDF In this issue How to Inspire and Motivate Students Asad Zaman Redefining Governance in Cooperative BanksMitja Stefancic, Silvio Goglio, and Ivana Catturani The Biophysical Basis of Production and the Public Economy June Sekera Tesla, Amazon, Bitcoin, Efficient Markets and FTT Dean Baker Keynes and Econometrics Maria Alejandra Madi Corrupted Economic Research—two...

According to the accepted narrative after about 1950 female participation rates started to rise thanks to inventions like the washing machine and kept rising forever after. Reality is more confusing. According to a recent book by Julia Sophie Wörsdorfer, washing machines were, contrary to the ideas of Ha-Joon Chang, not that important. Neither cross sectional data nor time series analysis yields a strong correlation between ownership of a washing machine and high female labour force...

from Lars Syll We are not going to get out of the economic doldrums as long as we continue to be obsessed with the unreasoned ideological goal of reducing the so-called deficit. The “deficit” is not an economic sin but an economic necessity … idle all around us. Alexan The administration is trying to bring the Titanic into harbor with a canoe paddle, while Congress is arguing over whether to use an oar or a paddle, and the Perot’s and budget balancers seem eager to lash the helm...