A Dynamic Vision for a Better Society.

I want to use a tweet by Josh Marshall of TPM to make a broader point about strategic thinking in politics, the situation in the Republican House, and state of competition between Democrats and Republicans. Here is Mashall’s tweet: The idea that Ds should have bailed out McCarthy is a codicil of the larger logic of DC punditry in which R bad behavior/destruction is assumed, a baseline like weather, and Ds managing the consequences of that...

from Peter Radford And women in this more enlightened era. One of the great ironies of the last few decades is the ascendancy of “individualistic” thinking in  economic theory combined with the primacy of the “collective” we call the corporation in the real world.  The two offer highly contrasting explanations of how economic activity takes place.  The one is based upon relationships between individuals acting rationally and equipped with amounts of information — and, presumably, the...

I really really hate to defend Donald Trump, but there is something I don’t get about this story “Trump Said to Have Revealed Nuclear Submarine Secrets to Australian Businessman.” Actually more than one thing, I don’t understand why it isn’t the number one story filling page A1 above the fold like the Anthony Weiner’s laptop has a backup of Huma Abedine’s e-mail story (which it turns out involved no US secrets revealed or endangered IIRC). This...

A follow up to Joel Eissenberg’s commentary on mRNA and how it came to be at BioNTech. This seemed interesting enough to add another post on mRNA discovery. Some more detail . . . Nobel Prize in medicine awarded to scientists who laid foundation for messenger RNA vaccines (msn.com), Carolyn Y. Johnson The Nobel Prize in medicine was awarded Monday to two scientists whose research laid the groundwork for messenger RNA vaccines that transformed...

LARC (Long Activer Reversible Contraceptives) are highly effective. It seems to me past time for the US Federal Government to pay for contraceptives (all types not just the device of pharmaceutical but also cost of care from the prescribing physician if required) for everyone who wants them (including Elon Musk if he changes his mind about reproducing as much as possible — no means test). I think that Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi should make a big...

Eurostat recently published new data on EU unemployment. The question: how is Southern Europe doing, after the Great Financial Crisis of 2009 when unemployment rates in Spain and Greece were above 20 and even 25%? Compared with the years directly after 2009 Spanish and Greek rates are down a lot, even when levels are still above 10%. But this is not all there is. Next to ‘normal’ unemployment, which is still at a crisis level, economic statisticians also define broad unemployment as...

Ekonomi — vetenskap eller gissningslek? Är nationalekonomi vetenskapligt baserad kunskap? Kan man förutspå hur enskilda individer eller hela samhällen kommer att agera ekonomiskt? Till exempel om miljonbonusar gör toppchefer mer lojala mot de företag som anställt dom? Kan ekonomiska analytiker verkligen se in i framtiden och förutspå kommande kriser? Eller handlar ekonomernas prognoser mer om en kvalificerad gissningslek? Yours truly försöker ge svar på de...

The current economic “big picture”: by no means are we out of the woods  – by New Deal democrat There is no particularly important economic news out today, so let me take this opportunity to step back and give you more of a “big picture” view of my current thinking. To the extent there is a consensus, it is that a recession has been avoided and a “soft landing” of low inflation and positive jobs and income news will continue. So far, the...

Where does money come from, what is it, and who benefits from its creation? With special guest, Clint Ballinger. Clint began his interest in economic development in the very long run while at The University of Texas at Austin. While there he worked with the World's oldest accounting tokens (Mesopotamian, 8000-3500 BC) under Denise Schmandt-Besserat and researched the development of both State and credit-money with a special interest in the debt-deflation work of Irving Fisher. For his M.A....