Tag Archives: US/Global Economics

Is More Work Better? Think Again? The freedom of free time, branded as unproductive “leisure,” gets no respect. Originally published at Wealth Economics This post is prompted by a recent tweet from the excellent Joey Politano, but it’s not singling out Joey in particular. “We could be working so much more.” It’s hard to come away with any other message. This tweet’s just one example of a lurking, largely unspoken, and quite likely...

This will be a long boring post amplifying on my slogan “asymptotically we will all be dead.” I assert that asymptotic theory and asymptotic approximations have nothing useful to contribute to the study of statistics. I therefore reject that vast bul of mathematical statistics as absolutely worthless. To stress the positive, I think useful work is done with numerical simulations — monte carlos in which pseudo data are generated with pseudo...

Weekly Indicators for February 12 – 16 at Seeking Alpha  – by New Deal democrat I am back from my travels, so it’s time to catch up. There’s no significant economic news until tomorrow, but in the meantime I neglected to link to my weekly high frequency indicator wrap-up, which was posted at Seeking Alpha. As usual, if you haven’t already done so, clicking over and reading will bring you up to the virtual minute on the economic data and...

Topical Emails from all different sites. Pulled from my In-Box and which I have no time to write about. Thinking, they still may be of interest to readers who visit Angry Bear. Please be topical or at least close. Healthcare Neighborhoods And Health: Interventions at the Neighborhood Level Could Help Advance Health Equity, Health Affairs. Mariana C. Arcaya, Ingrid Gould Ellen, and Justin Steil. Housing is tied to neighborhoods. To understand...

Full article at the link. Last night Prof: Heather Cox-Richardson reporting in “Letters from an American” a comment made by Tucker Carlson to Egyptian journalist Emad El Din Adeeb. Carlson emphasized an equivalency of American leaders to Russia’s Putin. My Letters Take . . . “Every leader kills people . . . Some kill more than others. Leadership requires killing people.”     I can not think of any US president openly assassinating a...

Is investment spending “spending,” or isn’t it? Steve Roth (@ Wealth Economics) J.M. Keynes’ brief Preface to the French edition of General Theory is sometimes held up as the most concise, cogent, and coherent expression of his economic understandings. It achieves that, but in doing so it also reveals a core incoherence in that thinking. An obligatory nod here to the importance of many pieces of Keynes’ thinking, notably the rather...

January 2024 consumer inflation: still a tug of war between gas and housing  – by New Deal democrat As it has been for going on two years, consumer inflation has boiled down to a contest of strength between energy (mainly gasoline), which peaked in June 2022 and roughed in June 2023, and housing, which peaked in early 2023 and has been gradually disinflating since. The headlines, as you presumably already know, are that total inflation rose...

I learn from Brad DeLong (nickname delong run) that Paul Schmelzing has gone to a truly heroic effort and estimated safe real interest rates since 1310! The main point is the long slow decline (it is ironic that one of the stylized growth “facts” is that there is no clear trend in real interest rates. Brad discusses this at length at his SubStack. Oddly, although he is one of the Efficient Markets Hypothesis’s worst enemies not named Robert...

From a comment thread over at jabberwocking.com:“The walls are more a sign of desperation than power. A better way is to fix Central America so there is a larger buffer between the US and the problems in South America. Fixing includes making conditions in the continent prosperous enough for all that we don’t have hordes desperately attempting dangerous journeys.”Exactly. Walls don’t work. But the GOP would rather spend billions on futility than spend...

I guess the US is not the only place having issues with the rising costs of healthcare. Swiss healthcare is rising at a faster rate also. However, I suspect Switzerland has greater control over those costs than the US does. However, the industry is attempting to pass along higher costs. The cost of compulsory health insurance in Switzerland rose by 4.6% in 2023 compared to the previous year, raising the bill per insured person to CHF4,513. ...