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On Monday of this week I gave a presentation on the current state of the Irish economy at a conference on the future of Europe at the LBJ School of Public Affairs. My presentation begins around the 33 minute mark and is followed by some Q&A. It can be accessed here: Presentation on the Irish economy div{float:left;margin-right:10px;} div.wpmrec2x div.u > div:nth-child(3n){margin-right:0px;} ]]> Advertisements

Note that hires and quits have stopped growing, and historically both lead job openings, in yet another indication that this cycle has reversed: Highlights September job openings edged up slightly to a very abundant 6.093 million from a revised 6.090 million in August. Over the month, hires and separations were also little changed at 5.3 million and 5.2 million, respectively. Within separations, the quits rate and the layoffs and discharges rate were little changed at 2.2...

from Lars Syll In advanced economics the question would be: ‘What besides mathematics should be in an economics lecture?’ In physics the familiar spirit is Archimedes the experimenter. But in economics, as in mathematics itself, it is theorem-proving Euclid who paces the halls … Economics … has become a mathematical game. The science has been drained out of economics, replaced by a Nintendo game of assumption-making … Most thoughtful economists think that the games on the blackboard and...

One of the advantages of marketeers, compared with neoclassical economists, is that they do not assume things about consumers but observe them or ask them questions. So did Nielsen India, a large marketing company, less then a month after the infamous Indian demonetisation. The report is ungated and, for one thing, contains valuable information about the female experience. An excerpt PART B: DECODING CONSUMER SENTIMENT (Source: Nielsen India)To pick up the consumer sentiment at this point...

from David Ruccio Mainstream economics lies in tatters. Certainly, the crash of 2007-08 and the Second Great Depression called into question mainstream macroeconomics, which has failed to provide a convincing explanation of either the causes or consequences of the most severe crisis of capitalism since the Great Depression of the 1930s. But mainstream microeconomics, too, increasingly appears to be a fantasy—especially when it comes to issues of corporate power. Neoclassical...

from Edward Fullbrook Determinism, the idea that everything that happens must happen as it does and could not have happened any other way, and atomism, the idea that the world is made up of entities whose qualities are independent of their relations with other entities, are fundament components of classical mechanics. Atomism is also central to the concept of mind developed in John Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, published (1690) three years after Newton’s Principia....

Bank credit growth continues to decelerate, to where historically, after revisions, the economy would already be in recession. Housing and vehicles look like they are already reporting negative growth, and personal income growth has decelerated to about 0% growth, with personal spending holding positive only because people are dipping into savings, which historically has always been followed by a reduction in spending: Less borrowing to spend translates into less...

Here’s a fascinating recent article with the forbidding title of The landscape of sex-differential transcriptome and its consequent selection in human adults.  I’ll provide the abstract, and then a translation into English.  Here’s the abstract: Background The prevalence of several human morbid phenotypes is sometimes much higher than intuitively expected. This can directly arise from the presence of two sexes, male and female, in one species. Men and...

from David Ruccio    Inequality in the United States is now so obscene that it’s impossible, even for mainstream economists, to avoid the issue of surplus.   Consider the two charts at the top of the post. On the left, income inequality is illustrated by the shares of pre-tax national income going to the top 1 percent (the blue line) and the bottom 90 percent (the red line). Between 1976 and 2014 (the last year for which data are available), the share of income at the top soared, from...