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Good evening.  Or a fine morning to you, whatever the case may be.   I am working on a project in my spare time.  Some of the data I am collecting might make for good blog posts. Anyway, there are a few things whose trajectory I’d like to measure historically.  I have come up ideas for most of them, but there are a few for which I wouldn’t mind if somebody had a better idea than the one I came up with.  Here are the ones that are troubling me.  From colonial...

from Lars Syll Causal modeling attempts to maintain this deductive focus within imperfect research by deriving models for observed associations from more elaborate causal (‘structural’) models with randomized inputs … But in the world of risk assessment … the causal-inference process cannot rely solely on deductions from models or other purely algorithmic approaches. Instead, when randomization is doubtful or simply false (as in typical applications), an honest analysis must consider...

Better than expected, but not nearly enough to even begin to conclude that the multi year deceleration has reversed: This chart does not tell me this multi year downtrend has been broken: And growth of the household survey is down to 1% year over year: Participation seems to be settling in at depressed levels not seen since before women started entering the labor force: Compare the recent gains with those of prior cycles: Above 0 has coincided with recession: Obama the Tea...

What’s happening in India? The people are clearly rolling back the recent move of the Indian government to basically abolish the cash economy: the amount of cash is, at the moment of writing this, increasing at a hyperinflation rate of 8,5% per fortnight (according to the Reservebank of India data). But the amount of cash is still way below last years’level. Bank deposits are 12% higher than last year but have been flat since December. The question is why cash was abolished. Read here,...

Dead people aren’t allowed to drive.  They aren’t allowed to vote.  They aren’t allowed to testify in court, acquire weaponry, check out books from the library or acquire a pilot’s license.  This makes sense.  After all, dead people don’t have a functioning brain.  As a result, we wouldn’t want them driving or voting or wandering around the local library.  But there is one thing dead people are allowed to do.  They’re allowed to dispose of assets, or rather,...

from David Ruccio Millions of workers have been displaced by robots. Or, if they have managed to keep their jobs, they’re being deskilled and transformed into appendages of automated machines. We also know that millions more workers and their jobs are threatened by much-anticipated future waves of robotics and other forms of automation. But mainstream economists don’t want us to touch those robots. Just ask Larry Summers. Summers is particularly incensed by Bill Gates’s suggestion that...

Trump’s America First economic strategy looks a lot like the import substitution economic development strategy that was so popular several decades ago—notably in Latin America and South Asia..  But it only had limited success, especially compared to the export led growth strategy followed in East Asia.  Import substitution tended to produce fragmented, inefficient and low productivity industries protected from foreign competition by high tariffs and other...

from Lars Syll There’s no question that mainstream academic macroeconomics failed pretty spectacularly in 2008 … Many among the heterodox would have us believe that their paradigm worked perfectly well in 2008 and after … This is dramatically overselling the product. First, heterodox models didn’t “predict” the crisis in the sense of an actual quantitative forecast. This is because much of heterodox theory is non-quantitative. Basically, people write down English words explaining their...

The growth rate has slowed and the level of apps remains depressed: Nice move up. This is just a forecast of Friday’s number: Highlights The February employment report looks to be a blockbuster based on ADP’s estimate for giant growth of 298,000 in private payrolls. This would be the biggest gain since October 2015 and one of the very largest of the cycle. ADP isn’t always followed closely but its call last month for outsized growth in January payrolls did prove correct....