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from David Ruccio Culture, it seems, is back on the agenda in economics. Thomas Piketty, in Capital in the Twenty-First Century, famously invoked the novels of Honoré de Balzac and Jane Austen because they dramatized the immobility of a nineteenth-century world where inequality guaranteed more inequality (which, of course, is where we’re heading again). Robert J. Shiller, past president of the American Economic Association, focused on “Narrative Economics” in his address at the January...

from Gary Flomenhoft, “The triumph of Pareto”, real-world economics review, issue no. 80, 26 June 2017, pp. 14-31. There are several serious problems with the use of Pareto Optimality as the central goal of economics. One of the primary implications of “Pareto Optimality” is that it accepts the current distribution of wealth as a given. If any income distribution can lead to an “optimal” outcome, there is no need to be concerned about just distribution. Mainstream economists generally...

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...

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 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...