Tag Archives: Uncategorized

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...

A presidential candidate like Donald Trump should not be viable. Candidates he supports should not be viable. The existence of Donald Trump should be a boon for the Democrats. And, in fact, it has been. But it hasn’t been enough. Perhaps four (or eight?) years worth of results will tip the balance for Democrats, but it is reasonable to ask: why have Democrats been coming up short against Trump, both in the Presidential election and in special elections...

from Dean Baker The most popular explanation for the sharp rise in inequality over the last four decades is technology. The story goes that technology has increased the demand for sophisticated skills while undercutting the demand for routine manual labor. This view has the advantage over competing explanations, like trade policy and labor market policy, that it can be seen as something that happened independent of policy. If trade policy or labor market policy explain the transfer of...

from David Ruccio The timing could not have been better, at least for me. It just so happens I’m teaching Thorsten Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class this week. It should become quickly obvious to students that, as I have argued before on this blog, we’re now in the midst of a Second Gilded Age.   This is confirmed in a new report by UBS/PwC, according to which, after a brief pause in 2015, the expansion in billionaire wealth around the world has resumed. Thus, billionaire wealth rose...

from Asad Zaman Varian start his intermediate micro text by stating the maximization and equilbrium are the core principles of micro. Krugman recently stated that I am a “maximization and equilibrium” kind of guy. The goal of this lecture is to show that these two principles fail completely to help us understand behavior is a very simple model of a duopoly. In last lecture (AM03), we introduced a simple duopoly model. Two ice-cream vendors buy ice-cream wholesale and can sell at any...

2 month average is 167,500: Highlights ADP is calling for a limited snap back in the October employment report. ADP sees private payrolls rising 235,000 which is just on the high side of ADP’s usual estimates. Actual private payrolls fell 40,000 in September, pulled down by hurricane dislocations. Today’s results may, only on the margin, pull down expectations for Friday’s private payrolls where the consensus is currently 320,000. Service sector employment growth began...

from Lars Syll Applied game theory is a theory of real-world facts, where we use game theoretical definitions, axioms, theorems and (try to) test if real-world phenomena ‘satisfy’ the axioms and the inferences made from them. When confronted with the real world we can (hopefully) judge if game theory really tells us if things are as postulated by theory. But there is also an influential group of game theoreticians that think that game theory is nothing but pure theory, an...