Understanding Ownership: Economic Expert Explains

Statistical assumptions and racial bias Our analysis indicates that existing empirical work in this area is producing a misleading portrait of evidence as to the severity of racial bias in police behavior. Replicating and extending the study of police behavior in New York in Fryer (2019), we show that the consequences of ignoring the selective process that generates police data are severe, leading analysts to dramatically underestimate or conceal entirely...

Student Debt Abolishment: A Game-Changer

Mainstream medieval inflation medicine Inflation peaked back in June 2022, only three months after the Fed started hiking interest rates. At that time, the Fed’s policy rate had risen just 75 basis points, and no one knew how much higher it might go. In fact, we have no evidence that monetary policy had any significant effect on the course taken by prices – certainly not before the June 2022 turning point, and not thereafter, either. In modern medicine, a...

Some light reading. I subscribe to it (The Atlantic) and have done so since the Civil War for a decade. Thought I would post one from The Atlantic’s News Letter (I think). Just an interesting read about something they discovered happening or maybe not-happening. People locked into something they do not like, have to stay, and when the opportunity arises, they leave. Especially if there is money to be made or less time at work or less work. What if...

USPS tells regulator, “Mind your own regulations.” Save the Post Office, Steve Hutkins The Postal Service has started off the New Year by refusing to answer important questions about its 10-year plan, Delivering for America. Earlier this week, the Postal Service told the Postal Regulatory Commission that its latest information request was outside the statutory authority of the Commission. The Postal Service has basically told the PRC to mind...

I was looking for a report through 2022 on housing. This was the best I could do. Maybe later? The report is about households with or without SS beneficiaries who are renting, homeowners with mortgages, and homeowners without mortgages. The study is looking at the cost impact in each category for those households with SS beneficiaries as compared to those households with no beneficiaries. Kind of dry; but, it gets the point across. Research...

I don’t know if kids these days still use the slang, but back in the glory days of blogging, a way to mock chicken hawks was to call them keyboard warriors or the 101st chairborn. These were people convinced they were fighting terror by advocating aggressive foreign policy in the safety of their own house (or by other insulting assumption their mother’s basement). I guess an even sillier bunch were the people who felt brave and manly while playing,...

Scenes from the jobs report 2: the unemployment rate and consumption: weak, but not recessionary  – by New Deal democrat Yesterday I looked at some employment metrics from Friday’s jobs report. Today let’s look at un- (and under-) employment. Every Thursday I repeat the mantra that jobless claims lead the unemployment rate. Here are both the U3 (blue) and U6 (red) rates from Friday’s report, compared YoY: The unemployment rate is...

from Steve Keen and RWER issue 106 Human society is energy blind. Like a fish in water, it takes for granted the existence of that without which it could not survive. As with so many of humanity’s problems, this conceptual failure can be traced back to an economist. However, the guilty party is not one of “the usual suspects”—Neoclassical economists—but the person virtually all economists describe as “the Father of Economics”, Adam Smith. Smith led economics astray on the vital issue of...