Ravel is a whole new way to analyse multidimensional data--which is anything that won't fit into the rows and columns of an Excel spreadsheet. This gives it much more power than Excel, but it also presents challenges when you import a CSV file into Ravel. The cause here is what is known as "the curse of dimensionality". A CSV file in Excel is just a 2-dimensional array of unrelated numbers, and its memory needs are the number of rows, times the number of columns, times how many...

The US economy appears to be emerging from the recent recession (pace the Fed interest rate decisions). There’s a general consensus that that recession was largely caused by the COVID-19 pandemic and consequent supply chain disruptions. What lessons might be learned on how to maximally blunt the impact of future pandemics while minimizing negative economic consequences?Here’s a cross-sectional analysis including all 50 US states plus the District of...

The promise of social mobility is broken for many people. This makes it tempting to blame meritocracy, claiming that the ideal merely serves to uphold an unjust system. But if taken seriously, this remedy would have disastrous effects. A world in which top positions are not even supposed to go to the most deserving would be less affluent because unqualified people would ascend to important positions of leadership and everyone would have fewer incentives to develop their...

I have a letter in The Chronicle of Higher Education responding to Steven Teles’ call for more conservative college professors. It’s a shortened version of a longer piece I wrote, which I’m posting here. The fact that conservatives are thin in the humanities and social sciences departments of US college campuses is well known. A natural question, raised by Steven Teles, is whether the rarity of conservative professors in these fields reflects some form of direct or structural...

Just ask anyone off the street and by simple common sense they will understand what is going on better than the so-called pros.

– by New Deal democrat Continuing my catching up this week, let’s take a look in some further detail about why I didn’t think Friday’s jobs report portended recession – at least, not yet. As I always point out, the jobs report does contain some leading numbers. These are generally employment in more cyclical industries that, when they turn down, start the cascade into the broader economy. Generally speaking, these are all goods-producing...

Herds Don't Survive Economic Cliffs.

from Lars Syll Paul Davidson, the co-founder of the Journal of Post Keynesian Economics (JPKE) and a leading Post Keynesian economist, died on June 20, 2024, in Chicago. He was born in Brooklyn, NY, on October 23, 1930, about a year after the Great Crash of 1929. He was a staunch defender of the importance of John Maynard Keynes, whose ideas, he insisted, differed fundamentally from those of the Neo-Keynesians who came to dominate American macroeconomics after World War II. He viewed...

"The numbers scream at you that private debt and credit are truly significant to determining economic activity, and the mainstream, like Paul Krugman and Ben Bernanke, ignore it completely." -- Join ~10,000 Other Truth-Seekers by Downloading my new 'Funny Money' Bundle for Free at https://new.stevekeenfree.com Are you an engineer, finance, or IT professional? If you are, the 7-Week Rebel Economist Challenge is for you. If you qualify, I will work closely with you every week to...

There’s a lot of attention being paid these days to EVs and solar power, but there are plenty of other ways to decarbonize human activity. Public transportation is one. I’m certainly no stranger to public transportation. I didn’t have a car in college, so when I visited my grandmother in Johnstown or my sister in Philadelphia, I took the Greyhound. When I visited my folks in Manhattan, I got around by subway. My wife and I didn’t have a car in grad...