December real retail sales: the good economic news keeps on coming  – by New Deal democrat The good economic news kept coming with this morning’s retail sales report for December. Remember that this is one of my favorite indicators because, adjusted for population, it is a fairly good long leading indicator, and on a short term basis has a consistent record of leading the trend in employment. Nominally retail spending increased 0.6% for the...

Breaking Free from Extreme Economics

Every day brings new of “breakthroughs” in biomedical research. Most of these are incremental advances, and many you never hear about again because they couldn’t be replicated, failed in early clinical trials, or some other problem.But as described in this link from Wired, I think this could be real progress for Parkinson’s therapy research. While I’ve checked for all the known risk alleles in genes like SNCA, PINK1, LRRK2, PARK7, etc. in my genome...

The decline in workers’ share of the total pie is far more extreme than standard measures suggest. Total Income, and the Collapse of the Household Labor Share, Wealth Economics, Steve Roth The best way to start this post is with a graph that many will find surprising, even eye-popping. The graph kind of speaks for itself — pretty dismayingly, especially post-covid. The rest of this post just explains it. This graph answers a question...

Before you read the NPR article, I “will” make a few comments. In no way did the Sacklers not know of the impact of the OxyContin. The sale of it as being non addictive was made up from the get-go of the product. Indeed, one larger than life promotion of OxyContin was done with the misuse of the Jick and Porter letter as taken from The New England Journal of Medicine. In 1980, Doctors Jick and Porter had written a “one-paragraph letter” that...

RCTs in the field of development — a critical perspective .[embedded content]

Figure 1: A Two-Dimensional Parameter Space The above is for this example. I wish somebody would be inspired by this to write it up with mathematical proofs. What I see here is found by numerical methods. Figure 1 shows a partition of the parameter space based on fluke switch points. The dashed line shows the temporal path in the previous post. Each of the solid lines are parallel affine functions, with a slope of unity. A proof that these slopes are unity should be able to handle a model...

As a former union member, Reader Denis Drew writes about Labor and Unions. You can read him at Angry Bear from time to time or at his Blog site: “On Today’s Page,” on todays page, Denis Drew. Jimmy Hoffa’s dream – Jimmy Hoffa’s worst nightmare First: Jimmy Hoffa’s medical labor market wet dream:   a) cannot stop technical employees from organizing,   b) demand is everywhere and ever growing   c) bills paid automatically by insurance or...

Unlocking Non-Financial Equity for Economic Power

As vehicles and outdoor appliances become increasingly electric, long term gas usage – and “real” prices – decline  – by New Deal democrat What is the “real” cost of gasoline? When measuring this, some people compare with the CPI. But that actually just tells you the *relative* inflation in gas vs. other items. That’s why, for example, when I want to look at the “real” cost of housing, I measure against income, such as average hourly earnings....