Why home insurance rates are rising so fast across the US. Climate change plays a big role, The Conversation Millions of Americans have been watching with growing alarm as their homeowner insurance premiums rise and their coverage shrinks. Nationwide, premiums rose 34% between 2017 and 2023, and they continued to rise in 2024 across much of the country. To add insult to injury, those rates go even higher if you make a claim – as much as 25% if...

This paper investigates the impact of different varieties of capitalism (VoC) on societal happiness. It begins with a critique of Neoclassical welfare economics which emphasizes Pareto optimality, and it argues for focusing on reported societal happiness. The paper identifies five VoC. Using a sample of twenty-six high-income countries drawn from the 2020 World Happiness Report, […]

Economists and Wall Street analysts simply do not understand accounting. 

– by New Deal democrat This morning’s repeat house price indexes from the FHFA and Case Shiller continued to show deceleration in this metric which is very important to home buyers. Specifically, in the three month average through July, U.S. house prices rose 0.2% according to Case Shiller’s national index, and only 0.1% according to the slightly more leading Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) purchase only index, both on a seasonally adjusted...

It is instructive to consider cases in which most people readily accept causal claims in the absence of randomized experiments. Nowadays, few people doubt the effects of tobacco smoking on lung cancer. But in the 1950s, tobacco lobbyists embraced the idea that a genetic predisposition caused both a tendency to smoke and lung cancer … In other words, they claimed that there was an unblocked backdoor path. This idea was dispelled not by randomized, controlled experiments in...

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Lewis Strauss, former chair of the AEC, coined the phrase “too cheap to meter” referring to the potential for nuclear power. It was a phrase I grew up hearing in Oak Ridge TN, but it never came to be, there or anywhere else.Now, the Wall Street Journal claims that day has arrived, not because of nuclear, but because of wind and solar:“The changes sweeping Europe’s electricity markets, which were accelerated by the energy crisis brought on by the war...

September 23, 2024 Prof. Heather Cox-Richardson Letters from an American That is how they are describing a desperate Trump . “There’s nothing sadder than an aging salesman trying to close one last deal,” MSNBC’s Ryan Teague Beckwith wrote on September 21. Beckwith went on to list seven of Trump’s most recent campaign promises, most delivered off the cuff at rallies, that are transparent attempts to close the deal with different groups of...

by Edward Carver Common Dreams In a first-of-its-kind lawsuit, California Attorney General Rob Bonta on Monday sued oil giant ExxonMobil for allegedly deceiving the public about the recyclability of plastics so as to continue increasing production. The 147-page lawsuit, filed in San Francisco County Superior Court, came following a yearslong  investigation that environmental groups were hoping would lead to legal action. They widely...

by Chris Dall University Minnesota.edu “ambient air pollution and heightened antibiotic use” A new study by Spanish researchers suggests that short-term exposure to air pollution may be tied to increased antibiotic use in people experiencing respiratory symptoms. The study, was published in JAMA Network Open, found that increases of daily ambient air pollution in 11 Spanish cities over 7 years were associated with increased antibiotic...