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from Lars Syll A democratic polity is supposed to be based on egalitarian distribution of political power. In a system where virtually all resources are available for a price, economic power can be translated into political power by channels too obvious for mention. In a capitalist society, economic power is very unequally distributed, and hence democratic government is inevitably something of a sham. In a sense, the maintained ideal of democracy makes matters worse, for it adds the...

from Dean Baker Tony Blair, the former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, who is best known for lying his country into participating in the Iraq War, lectured NYT readers on the evils of populism. Once again he gets many key points wrong. He criticizes the left for abandoning centrist politicians: “One element has aligned with the right in revolt against globalization, but with business taking the place of migrants as the chief evil. They agree with the right-wing populists about...

I was re-reading random parts of Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature and came across this: In an insightful book on the history of force, the political scientist James Payne suggests that ancient peoples put a low value on other people’s lives because pain and death were so common in their own. This set a low threshold for any practice that had a chance of bringing them an advantage, even if the price was the lives of others. And if the ancients believed...

from David Ruccio It’s true (as I have argued many times on this blog), the number of U.S. manufacturing jobs has been declining for decades now—and they’re not coming back. Instead, they’ve been replaced (as is clear in the chart above) by service-sector jobs.   source And, not surprisingly, most new jobs (during the past year, as in recent decades) have appeared in urban centers. But the idea that service-sector job growth in some urban centers—or “brain hubs,” as The Geography of...

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,...