Tag Archives: Uncategorized

from Peter Radford Well done AJR.  A prize deserved.  And remarkably little grumbling.  What’s wrong with that? In other news, my wife is deep into creating an artificial intelligence application.  One of the great challenges of getting AI to be useful is something called ‘prompt engineering’.   What have these two snippets of news have in common? The great thing about our better economists — the triumvirate we know affectionately as AJR being an example — is that they all seem to...

from Lars Syll Today’s model of delegation has much to recommend it. But it should not be cloaked in euphemism. It is an abrogation of democratic sovereignty for pragmatic reasons, conditioned on the one hand by deeply entrenched and unflattering assumptions about electoral politics and, on the other, on an unquestioning acceptance of the private organization of credit markets and their lack of confidence in democratic control of economic policy. This may be an abrogation that we are...

[unable to retrieve full-text content]The election is very close.  This piece explains why the polls could easily be off by 5 points or more.  Because the polling errors are very likely correlated across states, this means there is a reasonable chance that the election will not end up being close, but we have no idea who is ahead.  Trump […] The post What if Trump wins? appeared first on Angry Bear.

Watch this and ask yourself if you know: “Gaza”: an Al Jazeera Investigative Unit documentary

[unable to retrieve full-text content]There is considerable doubt about Richard Glossip’s guilt for a brutal 1997 murder in Oklahoma City, for which he has twice been sentenced to death. It also appears unquestionable that he has never gotten a fair trial.  Glossip’s case is now before the U.S. Supreme Court, where his fate may actually be determined by the incoherence of the court’s recusal […] The post And It Makes No Difference Whether...

from Steven Klees I am quite sure that this year’s three Nobel Laureates in economics — Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and James Robinson – are very competent new institutionalist economists.  Lars Syll offers a thoughtful critique of their substantive arguments, but he misses the main point for me.  New institutional economics, by and large, is nonsense.  We used to have many sensible institutional economists who offered a qualitative, sociological-type analysis of the role of economic...

I spend a lot of time these days thinking about what I, and Australia as a nation, should do if the US ceases to be a democracy. But, it doesn’t seem as if lots of other people are thinking this way. One possibility is that people just don’t want to think about it. Another, though, is that I’ve overestimated the probability of this outcome. To check on this, I set up a flowchart using a free online program called drawio. Here;s what I came up with I hope it’s self-explanatory....

[unable to retrieve full-text content]And quite frankly, Trump is not interested in Americans and Families unless they are a part of the 1-percenters in Income. To be in the top 1% of earners, you’re looking at an average annual income of $819,324. The top 0.1% of Americans earn an average of $3,312,693. These are same people who benefit the […] The post “I want Americans and families to be able to not just get by, but be able to get ahead.” appeared first on Angry Bear.

from Maria Alejandra and WEA Pedagogy Blog Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, professor at the School of Advanced Studies in Social Sciences in Paris, challenges our understanding of the current energy transition process. In his book “The Shock of the Anthropocene: The Earth, History, and Us,” co-authored with Christophe Bonneuil, Fressoz offers a critical history of the Anthropocene, the current geological epoch defined by significant human impact on Earth’s geology and ecosystems. The authors...

from C. P. Chandrasekhar and Jayati Ghosh The latest World Employment and Social Outlook Report (update for September 2024) from the International Labour Organisation highlights some disturbing trends. Importantly, it identifies a significant decline and then stagnation in the share of labour income in GDP, for the world as a whole, in the past few years. This comes as part of a persistent trend of decline in labour income shares, other than spikes in “crisis years” like 2008-10 and...