Last week (February 15, 2024), the Japanese Cabinet Office released the latest national accounts estimates for the December-quarter 2023 – Quarterly Estimates of GDP for Oct.-Dec. 2023 (The First preliminary) – which showed that the economy had slipped into an official recession (two consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth) and in the process had moved from being the third largest economy in the world to become the fourth behind the US, China and Germany. According to the media release –...

Game theory — a waste of time on a staggering scale We certainly agree that regularities or models that explain or that give heuristic value over many different cases are highly desirable. But ones that do neither are not — especially if they use up huge resources along the way. When looking at the details, the Prisoner’s Dilemma’s explanatory record so far is poor and its heuristic record mixed at best. The only way to get a reliable sense of what...

Potential outcomes and regression (student stuff) .[embedded content]

1.0 Introduction A simple labor theory of value holds in two special cases. The rate of profits in the system of prices of production is zero. The vector of direct labor coefficients is an eigenvector of the Leontief input-output matrix corresponding to the maximum eigenvalue. I do not know if I've worked through this alone before. A more rigorous approach would prove the uniqueness of the solution. 2.0 The Setting Suppose a capitalist economy is observed at a given point in time. n...

Global Carbon Tax Flaws Revealed

We were living in Michigan when Engler and the Republican Legislature passed Right to Work Laws. The effort was meant to undercut Unions and saving costs for the Big Three automakers. Supposedly cars would be lower in costs to with the reductions reflected in prices to consumers. Never happened. Michigan reversed Right to Work Laws just recently. Michigan becomes 1st state in decades to repeal ‘right-to-work’ law, PBS NewsHour, Paula Gardner...

Topical Emails from all different sites. Pulled from my In-Box and which I have no time to write about. Thinking, they still may be of interest to readers who visit Angry Bear. Please be topical or at least close. Healthcare Neighborhoods And Health: Interventions at the Neighborhood Level Could Help Advance Health Equity, Health Affairs. Mariana C. Arcaya, Ingrid Gould Ellen, and Justin Steil. Housing is tied to neighborhoods. To understand...

from Victor Beker and RWER issue 106 There was a time when it was thought that the main task of economics was to assure economic growth. For example, John M. Keynes predicted that “the day is not far off when the Economic Problem will take the back seat where it belongs” (Keynes 1931: 6). Then, once scarcity has been overcome, mankind would devote most of its efforts to real problems, the problems of life and human relations (ibid,). The impact of economic growth on the Earth environment...

One of the most reliable lazy pundit columns Democrats in disarray and the related warning that Democrats have to watch out for the damage done by the McGovern wing of the party. Lazy pundits have a problem as Democrats are in array and only aging boomers such as myself remember 1972 (even older boomer Michael Kinsley noted that it is odd that the party which nominated Richard Nixon isn’t the one constantly apologizing for the mistake they made in...

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...