It appears rent, transportation, and medical care services are the culprits holding up a decrease in inflation. Medicare does not surprise me at all. Harvard School of Health blames the rise of prices on administrative expenses, corporate greed and price gouging, and higher utilization of costly medical technology. What to Look for in the April CPI by Dean Baker CEPR The overall and core Consumer Price Index (CPI) both increased by 0.4...

Pharma companies providing pharmaceuticals exclusive to them have vast amounts of control in availability and or pricing. Either can result in increased costs to the patient. Economist Timothy Taylor reviews one particular instance with Teva Pharmaceuticals. Collaboration with other companies to control pricing appears to be Teva’s Director of Strategic Customer Marketing Nisha Patel’s strong suits. by Timothy Taylor Conversable Economist...

from Dean Baker The New York Times reported that Jim Simons, the founder of Medallion hedge fund, died this week. As a result of his fund, according to the article, he accumulated more than $20 billion over his lifetime. Simons was a math genius who had made many important breakthroughs in various areas of math. Back in the 1980s, he decided that he could make far more money on Wall Street than in doing math at a university. He thought that with sophisticated algorithms and cutting-edge...

Revolutionizing Economics: Breaking Free

by Professor Heather Cox-Richarson Letters from an American If you google the history of Mother’s Day, the internet will tell you that Mother’s Day began in 1908 when Anna Jarvis decided to honor her mother. But “Mothers’ Day”—with the apostrophe not in the singular spot, but in the plural—actually started in the 1870s, when the sheer enormity of the death caused by the Civil War and the Franco-Prussian War convinced writer and reformer Julia...

For quite a while I’ve been meaning to write a piece appreciating Ross Gittins’ 50 year run as Australia’s leading economic journalist. He’s one of the few who is neither an ideologue nor a recycler of corporate talking points (no names, no pack drill, but most of my readers will be able to think of plenty of examples).This plan was pushed to the top of my agenda when Ross gave an exceptionally generous donation to support my Brissie to the Bay cycle ride in support of MS Queensland....

Another Monday Message Board. Post comments on any topic. Civil discussion and no coarse language please. Side discussions and idees fixes to the sandpits, please. I’m now using Substack as a blogging platform, and for my monthly email newsletter. For the moment, I’ll post both at this blog and on Substack. You can also follow me on Mastodon here. Share this:Like Loading...

Unlocking Collective Intelligence: Evolve Together

In the summer of 1984, I lived on the ranch of Gerald “Digger” Moravek, just outside Sheridan, Wyoming.  Like many of the ranchers who banded together to establish the Powder River Basin Resource Council, where I was working, Digger was drawn to environmentalism partly for self-interested reasons:  in the early 1970s a coal company was blasting near his land and damaging his house.  But fighting coal companies and limiting the damage from strip...

Unlocking Non-Financial Equity for Economic Power