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The PMC annual bike ride is this weekend, so much appreciate that those of you who haven’t yet done soget your donations in, thanks, and if any of you will be there, let me know and I’ll be looking for you! http://www2.pmc.org/profile/WM0015 Settling down a bit: Better than expected: Better than expected, lots of volatility, and anticipates existing home sales by a couple of months, which have flattened this year: Highlights After three straight declines, the pending home...

In my last post, I noted a positive correlation between the homicide rate in a state and killings by the police in the same state. In states where the risk of homicide is higher, police killings also tend to be higher. But there is a mitigating race component, and one which (not surprisingly for those who care about data) goes against conventional wisdom: for the same state homicide rate, people are less likely to be shot by cops in states where Black people...

In my last post, I noted a positive correlation between the homicide rate in a state and killings by the police in the same state. In states where the risk of homicide is higher, police killings also tend to be higher. But there is a mitigating race component, and one which (not surprisingly for those who care about data) goes against conventional wisdom: for the same state homicide rate, people are less likely to be shot by cops in states where Black...

In line with low aggregate demand: http://econintersect.com/a/blogs/blog1.php/gdp-growth-seems-to-be-normalizing As mentioned above, real per-capita annual disposable income dropped materially (by $74 per annum). At the same time the household savings rate was reported to have dropped by -0.1% from a sharp downward revision (-1.2%) to the prior quarter. It is important to keep this line item in perspective: real per-capita annual disposable income is up only +7.11% in...

from Asad Zaman As a preliminary demonstration, and an explanation of the “Three Methodologies“, we assess how they work in primitive hunter-gatherer societies. A hunter-gatherer is a human living in a society in which most or all food is obtained by foraging (collecting wild plants and pursuing wild animals), in contrast to agricultural societies, which rely mainly on domesticated species. There are many characteristics of such societies forced by the material conditions of production....

Up as expected though way down from initial forecasts as data deteriorated, and q1 was revised lower. More q2 data will be released over the next month when the first revision will be released. Consumer spending up vs prior quarter (but down year over year) even as consumer credit numbers decelerate, with ‘goods’ contributing over 1% to growth. Residential investment fell, in line with the deceleration in real estate lending, as did auto related spending, in line with...

from Lars Syll The production function has been a powerful instrument of miseducation. The student of economic theory is taught to write Q = f(L, K) where L is a quantity of labor, K a quantity of capital and Q a rate of output of commodities. He is instructed to assume all workers alike, and to measure L in man-hours of labor; he is told something about the index-number problem in choosing a unit of output; and then he is hurried on to the next question, in the hope that he will forget...

from David Ruccio We’ve all heard it at one time or another. Why is the price of gasoline so high? Mainstream economists respond, “it’s the market.” Or if you think you deserve a pay raise, the answer again is, “go get another offer and we’ll see if you’re worth it according to ‘the market’.” And then there’s CEO pay, which last year was 271 times the average pay of workers. Ah, it’s what “the market” has determined the appropriate compensation to be. “The market” explains...

from Lars Syll Yours truly had a post up the other day on John Rapley’s Twilight of the Money Gods. In the main I think Rapley is right in his attack on contemporary economics and its ‘priesthood,’ although he often seems to forget that there are — yes, it’s true — more than one approach in economics, and that his critique mainly pertains to mainstream neoclassical economics. Noah Smith, however, is not too happy about the book: There are certainly some grains of truth in this standard...