Blog The gap between universal credit and the cost of living is growing Universal credit is falling £890 a month short of essentials, despite inflation-linked uprating By Sam Tims 24 May 2023 No matter what we do for a living or where we live, we...

New home sales and prices: yet another confirmation of a bottom in sales, while prices continue to decline YoY  – by New Deal democrat The last of the monthly updates for new home construction, new home sales, was reported this morning. And it continued the theme from the other data (permits, starts, existing home sales); namely, the bottom in sales appears to be in, while prices are still declining. First, on sales: new home sales...

from Asad Zaman In my article on “Education of an Economist”, I have explained how I gradually came to realize that all I had learnt during my Ph.D. training at Stanford University was false. I would like to make this more specific and concrete, by providing some examples. A leading example is a paper on Power and Taxes which I studied as a graduate student. But, let me start from the beginning. Leijonhufvud, in his classic “Life Among the Econ” explains how the priestly caste of the...

Wokeism and the commodified academic industry .[embedded content]

Piercing the myth: How privatizers got their mitts on Medicare, The Stand, Kip Sullivan Insurance companies decried Medicare’s fee-for-service model. But then Congress let them replace it with something much worse. (May 4, 2023) — Congress enacted Medicare in 1965 as a fee-for-service system because the insurance industry did not want to insure the elderly and the poor. Today the insurance industry spends megabucks on advertising to lure...

When I read this (third article below), I thought of an earlier commentary by one of our peer-reviewed economists. This is what Robert Waldman had to say: “Investors are glad to pay the Treasury to keep their wealth safe. Now consider the US Federal Government intertemporal budget constraint — the present value of spending must be less than or equal to the present value of revenue. What is the present value of revenue ? It is calculated by...

The problem with identity politics and wokeism .[embedded content]

While appeal to R squared is a common rhetorical device, it is a very tenuous connection to any plausible explanatory virtues for many reasons. Either it is meant to be merely a measure of predictability in a given data set or it is a measure of causal influence. In either case it does not tell us much about explanatory power. Taken as a measure of predictive power, it is limited in that it predicts variances only. But what we mostly want to predict is levels, about which it...

What should President Biden do if Republicans refuse to raise the debt ceiling?  What should he say he will do, in advance, to avoid a catastrophe and gain leverage in negotiations?  The answer to these questions is far from clear. Krugman and Klein on unorthodox legal strategies Paul Krugman argues that the administration should do something – anything – to avoid a debt default.  He doesn’t care about the details – platinum coin, consul...

The so-called Gephardt Rule (in honor of Representative Dick Gephardt who introduced its first version) provided that when the House agrees to a budget resolution, the Clerk shall prepare a joint resolution suspending the debt limit for the fiscal year covered by the budget resolution. It was repealed at the beginning of the 107th Congress, which had a Republican majority.The Gephardt Rule reflects the language of the 14th Amendment and would obviate...