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from Jamie Morgan If you think cryptocurrency is priapic capitalism’s latest attempt to dick you, you are probably not alone. In the last year or so most people’s perception of cryptocurrency has fallen about as far as it could. Opinion, much like the value and solvency of the assets, has plummeted from ‘the sky’s the limit’ to a soft sewage-landing. Great swathes of the population of the US and UK invested in cryptocurrency over the pandemic period. Since then, a swift spiral of...

Open thread Feb. 24, 2023 – Angry Bear (angrybearblog.com) Tags: open thread

I had a piece in The Guardian a couple of days ago (it’s over the fold) looking at the was the mainstream print and electronic media (mis)handled the debate over the decision to reduce tax concessions on earnings of superannuation balances in excess of $3m. The weight of argument was strongly on the government’s side, and the media commentariat seemed to have conceded that. But the finance lobby has hit back with a series of utterly ludicrous arguments which have nonetheless been given...

from Lars Syll If you can’t devise an experiment that answers your question in a world where anything goes, then the odds of generating useful results with a modest budget and nonexperimental survey data seem pretty slim. The description of an ideal experiment also helps you formulate causal questions precisely. The mechanics of an ideal experiment highlight the forces you’d like to manipulate and the factors you’d like to hold constant. Research questions that cannot be answered by...

I spend a lot of my time thinking about global heating, where it’s often hard to be optimistic about the future. But there are some bright spots. In particular, there’s a good chance that 2023 will be the year that coal use finally begins a sustained decline, and relatedly the year the carbon dioxide emissions from electricity generation start to fall. This is by no means a sure thing. The International Energy Agency predicts a plateau, in which nearly all new electricity demand...

from Peter Radford What am I supposed to make of this? Martin Wolf, someone whose work I always pay attention to, flubs it and leaves us with a partial picture.  That’s unlike him.  Perhaps it was the editing? In any case the notion that the UK needs to generate more savings, which is what Wolf is arguing in his recent Financial Times article, needs a slight augmentation in his basic analysis. The problem begins when he says that “Investment is financed by savings”.  This is a very...

“The Rest of us,” by Stephen Birmingham, is subtitled “The Rise of America’s Eastern European Jews.” Birmingham wrote previously about the Sephardic Jewish immigration around the time of the American Revolution, and about the German Jews who arrived in the mid-1800s. This covers the third wave of Jewish immigration to the United States, the immigration of eastern European Jews starting in the late 19th century. These subsequent immigrants arriving...

from Lars Syll It is widely recognized but often tacitly neglected that all statistical approaches have intrinsic limitations that affect the degree to which they are applicable to particular contexts … John Maynard Keynes was perhaps the first to provide a concise and comprehensive summation of the key issues in his critique of Jan Tinbergen’s book Statistical Testing of Business Cycle Theories … Keynes’s intervention has, of course, become the basis of the “Tinbergen debate” and is a...

from Dean Baker On a lazy Friday afternoon, a person’s thoughts naturally turn to car price indexes. There is actually a reason that I became interested in this topic. I noticed that in the January Consumer Price Index, the new vehicle index rose 0.2 percent. The December measure was revised up due to new seasonal adjustment factors so that what had been reported as a 0.1 percent decline last month is now reported as a 0.6 percent increase. I was inclined to think this was an aberration...