I would like to use Veteran Healthcare. However, the backlog is months out. So, I go to the outside for care. It is not that I want to do so. The VA has been short of staff for a while now. Much of this is a concerted effort to kick us out into public care. The present head a holdover from the Trump Admin. has not been doing much to staff the VA. This last go-around for my spine was a disaster. I met the surgeon who was good. She decided it might...

What kind of ‘rigour’ do RCTs provide? The bad news is, first, that there is no reason in general to suppose that an ATE [Average Treatment Effect] observed in one population will hold in others. That is what the slogan widespread now in education and elsewhere registers: “Context matters”.  The issue in this paper is not though about when we can expect a study result to hold elsewhere but rather when we can have EBPP-style [Evidence-Based Policy and...

My latest in The Guardian Announcements from major employers, including Amazon and Tabcorp, that workers will be required to return to the office five days a week have a familiar ring. There has been a steady flow of such directives. The Commonwealth Bank CEO, Matt Comyn, attracted a lot of attention with an announcement that workers would be required to attend the office for a minimum of 50% of the time, while the NSW public service was recently asked to return to the office at...

DT Cochrane joins the livestream this week to talk about Industrial Policy. Industrial policy is government policy to encourage the development and growth of all or part of the economy in pursuit of some public goal. Historically, it has often focused on the manufacturing sector, militarily important sectors, or on fostering an advantage in new technologies.

I asked it an economic question and oh brother, was it wrong. 

– by New Deal democrat I’ve been writing for the past number of weeks that we were approaching the acid test for the hypothesis that unresolved post-pandemic seasonality explained the sharp increase in jobless claims in the summer. This week we are fully immersed in the 6+ month comparison period where initial claims in the past two years averaged between 200,000-220,000. So, first the good news: initial claims declined -4,000 to 218,000, to...

Looking at business firms by age, what type of firms create jobs, and in what industry. In manufacturing, it would be older firms (eleven years or older) creating the most jobs. Older firms of eleven or more years are also creating more jobs in Retail. As we look at each category, older firms play a distinct role in job creation. The only time we see a distinct difference is in Accommodations where start-ups and one- to five-year-old firms have an...

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from Peter Radford What?  Surely not!  How dare he suggest such a thing. What, you are correct in asking, am I talking about? The recent speech by a Department of Justice official who dared suggest that it is getting quite difficult to find a truly neutral technocratic expert to give testimony in court.  Imagine the cheek.  How dare he question ‘expertise’.  Especially economic expertise, which is, surely, the gold standard. Why did he say what he said? Because academics are apparently so...