from Peter Radford Is it a cult? Is it a guild? Both perhaps? I remember reading sometime not long ago that Steve Levitt was leaving Chicago.  Two things stood out in the article bringing that news:  first, Levitt said he was concerned that economics was becoming irrelevant; second, someone had told him he was not doing ‘proper economics’. Here’s a clue who that someone was: Heckman. Then, more recently, the Financial Times editorial page accused the economics discipline of becoming a...

September 19, 2024 Letters from an American “Democracy depends on at least two healthy political parties that can compete for voters on a level playing field. Although the men who wrote the Constitution hated the idea of political parties, they quickly figured out the party’s tie voters to the mechanics of Congress and the presidency.” Only one such party exists. Yesterday morning, NPR reported that U.S. public health data are showing a...

Don’t study economics if you’re interested in economics! .[embedded content] Steve Keen gives a truthful view of the state of economics today. Modern economics has become increasingly irrelevant to the understanding of the real world. This irrelevance comes to a large extent from the failure of economists to match their deductive-axiomatic methods with their subject. Within mainstream economics, internal validity is everything and external validity is...

Purity is impossible, and half measures feel better than nothing but also are a failure. This is in regard to Microplastics which are next to impossible to avoid. And it’s all expensive. If a family is expecting a baby and wants, reasonably, to buy plastic-free baby products. Given everything humanity is learning about the possible impact of plastic on fetal and child development, they would have to be relatively rich to avoid plastics. The Cost...

These guys are ahead of us. What Scared Ford’s CEO in China, WSJ Jim Farley had just returned from China. What the Ford Motor chief executive found during the May visit made him anxious: The local automakers were pulling away in the electric-vehicle race.  In an early-morning call with fellow board member John Thornton, an exasperated Farley unloaded.  The Chinese carmakers are moving at light speed, he told Thornton, a former Goldman...

There’s more upside momentum ahead, but the economy is going to slow, and that won’t be good for stocks. 

 – by New Deal democrat You may recall that last week I wrote that beginning this week and for the next 6+ months, initial claims would be up against some very tough comparisons from 2023 and would be the ultimate true test of whether there has been unresolved post-pandemic seasonality in the numbers. Well, this week’s numbers suggest the unresolved seasonality hypothesis is still with us, but with considerable ambiguity. Initial claims did...

 – by New Deal democrat You may recall that last week I wrote that beginning this week and for the next 6+ months, initial claims would be up against some very tough comparisons from 2023 and would be the ultimate true test of whether there has been unresolved post-pandemic seasonality in the numbers. Well, this week’s numbers suggest the unresolved seasonality hypothesis is still with us, but with considerable ambiguity. Initial claims did...

Regeringens budget — en spottloska i ansiktet på landets löntagare Regeringen presenterade idag sin budget för år 2025. I de aviserade ‘satsningarna’ går nästan hälften till sänkta skatter för hushållen. Framför allt höginkomsttagare med månadsinkomster på över 60 000 kr får de största skattelättnaderna.  Detta är minst sagt provokativt om man tänker på alla de umbäranden vanliga löntagare genomlidit de senaste åren med höga räntor, dyr mat, nedbantade...

Endless online vitriol has been spilt promoting the idea that the COVID-19 pandemic was somehow either (a) an engineered pathogen or (b) a virus that escaped from a research facility. While those allegations served the interests of the Trump Administration, the actual, you know, scientific data supporting them was non-existant.Now, years later, the sorts of experiments that could have weighed in support of natural origins of the pandemic, the...