Tag Archives: Uncategorized

from Dean Baker We are seeing many terrible pictures from Houston as a result of Hurricane Harvey. People with young children and pets are wading through high water in the hope of being rescued by boat or helicopter. Elderly people in nursing homes are sitting in waist high water waiting to be rescued. It’s a pretty horrible story. One thing we can feel good about is that because the United States is a wealthy country, we do have large numbers of boats and helicopters and trained rescue...

from David Ruccio Corporate duplicity, it seems, knows no bounds. First, ExxonMobil misled the public about climate change for years, even as its research echoed the growing scientific consensus that global warming is real and caused by human activity. Then, while various states attorneys-general launched investigations of whether Exxon deceived shareholders and the public to protect its profits, the Wall Street Journal published 21 opinion pieces about current or potential Exxon...

Personal income growth remains weal as per the charts, which also showed a sharp drop in the personal savings rate, which generally forecasts reductions in spending: Highlights Vital signs for the consumer are strong but inflation is completely lifeless, based on a mixed personal income & outlays report for July. Income is the highlight, up 0.4 percent in the month including a second straight 0.5 percent gain for wages & salaries in what is an important and emerging...

Purchase applications were down again, as housing weakness reflects the drop in the growth of mortgage credit: Highlights Low mortgage rates are failing to entice home buyers, whose activity declined for the third straight week according to the Mortgage Bankers’ Association. Purchase applications for home mortgages fell a seasonally adjusted 3.0 percent in the August 25 week following 2 percent declines in the two prior weeks. Unadjusted, the purchase index decreased 5...

from Maria Alejandra Madi In the book Denationalisation of Money- the Argument Refined (1976), Hayek proposed the abolition of the government’s monopoly over the issue of fiat money in order to prevent price instability. In fact, his defense of a complete privatization of money supply stemmed from his disappointment with central banks’ management, which, in his opinion, had been highly influenced by politics. Thus, the ultimate objective of the denationalisation of money advocated by...

Last year I wrote a post noting that the income of group of immigrants in the US is correlated with the income of the country from where those immigrants hailed. I noted that this correlation is especially strong for immigrants in the US for the longest. I just stumbled on this paper from earlier this year by Joakim Ruist. Here’s the abstract: This paper aims to explain the high intergenerational persistence of inequality between groups of different...

from Lars Syll Back in 1991, when yours truly earned his first PhD​ with a dissertation on decision making and rationality in social choice theory and game theory, I concluded that “repeatedly it seems as though mathematical tractability and elegance — rather than realism and relevance — have been the most applied guidelines for the behavioural assumptions being made. On a political and social level, ​it is doubtful if the methodological individualism, ahistoricity and formalism they are...

from C. P. Chandrasekhar The defining feature of the economic programme of independent India’s first government was to accelerate the transition to a modern economy dominated by industry. Agriculture and related activities at that time accounted for around half of GDP and modern industry in the form of factory establishments for just above 6 per cent. Thus, colonial rule had made India the victim of the barriers to productivity increase typical of predominantly agrarian economies. These...

I stumbled on a blog post by Jerry Ratcliffe, who is a Professor of Criminal Justice and Director of the Center for Security and Crime Science at Temple University, Philadelphia, and a former police officer with London’s Metropolitan Police (UK). From one of this posts: Graph no. 2 is another image from my Intelligence-Led Policing book. The crime funnel represents what happens to a random selection of 1,000 crimes that affect the public (top bar). It...