Tag Archives: Uncategorized

from Asad Zaman Part 2 of Lecture on Spirituality and Development: Friday, 27th Jan 2017 by Dr. Asad Zaman, VC PIDE — for Students of Religion & Development Paper, Center of Development Studies, University of Cambridge. Click here to read outline of lecture and click here to watch the lecture.

Some years ago, Michael Kanell and I wrote a book called Presimetrics in which we tried to quantify the performance of Presidents along a range of issues objectively, using numbers. But what if we want a single measure of a Presidents performance? Put another way – how do we know whether a President was a success or a failure? I was born when Nixon was in office, though admittedly, I wasn’t paying all that much attention to politics at the time. But if I had...

Purchase applications seemed to have, at best, leveled off a what remains very depressed levels: Revenue neutral won’t do the trick, and since the tax cuts are likely to be lower multiple than any spending cuts it could slow things down: Taxpayers should expect to see revenue-neutral tax reform as early as this summer, Republican Sen. Rob Portman told CNBC on Wednesday. “We need to do it. It’s urgent. It’s one way we know we can give the economy a shot in the arm,” the Ohio...

from Dean Baker The media have been filled with accounts in recent years of how automation is displacing workers and threatening the country with mass unemployment. Even President Obama even made a point of warning about the dangers of mass displacement from automation in his farewell address. This obsession is bizarre for two reasons. The first is a simple empirical point. In contrast to the concern about automation leading to massive displacement, in recent years the pace of automation...

My wife has been enjoying the recent skits about the Trump administration on Saturday Night Live. I can see why. Even Melissa McCarthy has managed to be funny in her impressions of Sean Spicer. Until now I would have sworn that reports of McCarthy having a sense of humor were some sort of urban legend. SNL has a long history of generating memorable Presidential impressions: Chevy Chase (sort of Gerald Ford), Dana Carvey (Bush the Elder) and Will Ferrell (Bush...

from Stuart Birks and the WEA Newsletter Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) and George Orwell’s Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) are noted examples of dystopian literature. In contrast to idyllic utopian literature, they describe what might be considered to be seriously flawed societies. The authors wished to warn of potential dangers that might arise in the future. Huxley later published a follow-up collection of essays, Brave New World Revisited (1958) (BNWR). In...

Still looks to me like it’s already rolled over: Less than expected indicating spending likely to be less than expected as well: Highlights Growth in consumer credit slowed in December, to $14.2 billion vs an upward revised $25.2 billion in November. Revolving credit showed less life in December than prior months, rising only $2.4 billion vs November’s $11.8 billion. Weakness here helps explain the general weakness in core shopping during December. Nonrevolving credit,...

by Andrew J. Brown On Saturday morning, January 28, 2017, at Conway Hall in Central London, long an important place for radical religious, philosophical, social and political thinking in the UK, DiEM25 held its UK organisational launch. Like all DiEM25 gatherings, more than half of the meeting was made up of conversations involving those attending. To set the scene and introduce some important initial ideas, the morning began with brief contributions from Brian Eno, Elif Şafak, Agnieszka...

from David Ruccio Readers know the old adage: in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes. And, we should add, employers complaining they can’t find enough good workers. The fact is, if workers were really scarce, their wages would be rising dramatically. That’s how things works in a capitalist labor market: employers who want to hire workers offer higher wages. But, according to the latest report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, average hourly earnings of...

from Lars Syll Limiting model assumptions in economic science always have to be closely examined since if we are going to be able to show that the mechanisms or causes that we isolate and handle in our models are stable in the sense that they do not change when we “export” them to our “target systems”, we have to be able to show that they do not only hold under ceteris paribus conditions and a fortiori only are of limited value to our understanding, explanations or predictions of real...