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from David Ruccio source First, it was conspicuous consumption. Then, it was conspicuous philanthropy. Now, apparently, it’s conspicuous productivity.   According to Ben Tarnoff, the acquisition of insanely expensive commodities isn’t the only way that modern elites project power. More recently, another form of status display has emerged. In the new Gilded Age, identifying oneself as a member of the ruling class doesn’t just require conspicuous consumption. It requires conspicuous...

Bryce Covert and Josh Israel report Last year, 11,717 low-income residents of Mississippi applied to get a meager government benefit to help them make ends meet. The state’s welfare program, part of federal Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), gives a maximum of just $170 a month to a family of three. These applicants had applied hoping to get at least that crumb of cash assistance. But out of the pool—more than 11 thousand—only 167 people were...

The litany of shorter work week prophecy is prodigious. Keynes famously predicted a 15-hour work week for “our grandchildren” in 1930. Fifteen years later, in a letter to T.S. Eliot, Keynes parenthetically suggested a 35-hour work week for the U.S. in the immediate post-war period. In 1961, Clyde Dankert cited a New York Times article from 1949 in which a “well known labor economist” predicted a 20-hour work week by 1990 and a ten hour week by 2050. Eight...

Last month revised lower and low and below expectations this month. Again, in line with decelerating credit data which means persistent weakness in GDP: Highlights Based on the consumer and based on inflation, FOMC members won’t be feeling much pressure to raise rates at least not any time soon. Consumer spending was unchanged in March, even weaker than Econoday’s 0.1 percent consensus. More startling is the weakest showing in 16-1/2 years for core PCE prices which fell 0.1...

from WEA Commentaries My first book since Debunking Economics has just been released in the UK, and will come out in May in the USA. Can we avoid another financial crisis? is a brief (140 page, 25,000 word) explanation for the lay reader of how the 2008 crisis was caused by factors that mainstream economics ignores—fundamentally, the levels of private debt and credit-based demand—and why other countries that avoided a crisis in 2008 are likely to suffer a similar crisis in the near...

From: Larry Hamilton and Merijn Knibbe Following a twitter discussion between him and me about the question if the 2013-2015 warming of the first 700 meters of ocean was above trend or if 2016 was below trend, Larry Hamilton (@ichiloe) produced the next graph (which shows consistent and relentless warming not just of the surface of the earth but also of the first 700 meters of the oceans). These series are as far as I know measured in a totally independent way. ‘2017’ are partial data. We...

Earlier this month, the Government Accounting Office released a report entitled Countering Violent Extremism”. Its a great example of how to outright lie using data. (I note that the, um, “analysis” was performed between October 2015 and April 2017, and bears the previous administration’s imprint. The current administration’s inanities lie in an orthogonal direction.) The upshot of the report is: GAO recommends that DHS and DOJ direct the CVE Task Force to...

from Peter Radford Simplification, in the context of an economy, is the eradication of all things of interest. This does not mean that studying an economy is thus doomed to be a pointless recitation of history as it unfolds. It is, rather, the recognition that as an economy moves through time it is never, to paraphrase Heraclitus, possible to see the same thing twice. Each economy is different. Each instance of the same economy is different. Any attempt to generalize eradicates those...

from Asad Zaman Environmentalist David Suzuki hits the nail on the head. The number of ways that economic theory systematically blinds you to the realities of the world we live in is almost uncountable. When Henry George’s land tax became widely popular, economists “disappeared” land as a factor of production from economic theories, merging it illegitimately with capital. Money is made to “disappear” by using the quantity theory of money to claim that money is veil. This makes it...