Tag Archives: Uncategorized

In this post, I want to look at the murder rate, by state. I ran a regression with the state murder rate for 2015 as the dependent variable, and literally threw the kitchen sink at it: demographics, weaponry, income, education, population density, etc. Basically, if its something some reasonable percentage of the population believes matters, and I could find data for it, I threw it into the hopper. I also included variables relating to immigration status. The...

from Lars Syll Again and again, Oxford professor Simon Wren-Lewis rides out to defend orthodox macroeconomic theory against attacks from heterodox critics. A couple of years ago, it was rational expectations, microfoundations, and representative agent modeling he wanted to save. And now he is back with new flimflamming against heterodox attacks and pluralist demands from economics students all over the world: Attacks [against mainstream economics] are far from progressive. [D]evoting a...

from William Neil We begin with some gross numbers from Das’ Age of Stagnation: the loss of wealth from the Great Recession of 2008-2009. Citing the work of three economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas (Tyler Atkinson, David Luttrell and Harvey Rosenblum), the figures they put on the loss to the U.S. economy come to 6-14 trillion dollars, “equivalent to U.S. $50,000 to U.S. $120,000 for every American household, or 40-90% of one year’s economic output”. We’ve seen figures of...

from: Merijn Knibbe The graph shows the  ‘Ausländerarbeitslosenquote’ (unemployed foreigners ratio) which is calculated by the ‘Bundesagentur fur Arbeit’ (a kind of German ‘Bureau of Labor Statistics’). Unemployment of Germans in East Germany is, after about a quarter of a century, finally below 10% (but still high). But unemployment among ‘foreigners’ is way higher (foreigners are not necessarily immigrants: refugees and people from the Not Very United Kingdom count but so does the...

Yikes! Check out that 2nd derivative!;) Sure looks like something bad happened early in q416 to an economy already decelerating since oil capex collapsed just over a couple of years ago. Seems to me the only thing preventing a stock market collapse is a stock market collapse…;)

download whole issue Economic policy in the Trump Era          2Dean Baker          download pdf Major miscalculations: globalization, economic pain, social dislocation and the rise of Trump      13William Neil          download pdf Trumponomics and the developing world          29Jayati Ghosh          download pdf Nature abhors a vacuum: sex, emotion, loyalty and the rise of illiberal economics          35Julie A. Nelson          download pdf Is Trump wrong on trade? A partial defense...

Trumped up expectations are fading a bit while ‘hard data’ continues to fade. And note the real disposable personal income chart which continues its deceleration that began when oil capex collapsed: Highlights A second month of weak spending on services pulled down on consumer spending which could only manage a 0.1 percent rise in February, one that follows a nearly as weak 0.2 percent gain in January. February’s result is below consensus and at the low end of the Econoday...

from Michael Hudson At the time this volume is going to press, there is no way of knowing how successful these international reversals will be. What is more clear is what Trump’s political impact will have at home. His victory – or more accurately, Hillary’s resounding loss and the way she lost – has encouraged enormous pressure for a realignment of both parties. Regardless of what President Trump may achieve vis-à-vis Europe, his actions as celebrity chaos agent may break up U.S....

from Lars Syll It is well known that even experienced scientists routinely misinterpret p-values in all sorts of ways, including confusion of statistical and practical significance, treating non-rejection as acceptance of the null hypothesis, and interpreting the p-value as some sort of replication probability or as the posterior probability that the null hypothesis is true … It is shocking that these errors seem so hard-wired into statisticians’ thinking, and this suggests that our...