Former Bear Bill McBride at Calculated Risk is sharing another of his excellent commentaries. This time his focus is on rising homeowner insurance costs. Timely for sure. Helene has gone through the southern states and another hurricane is coming. Insurance costs were up then and will more-than-likely increase again for states bordering the Atlantic. I have noticed our HO Insurance taking a jump also. CalculatedRisk Newsletter by Bill McBride...

Economist David Zetland at The one-handed economist blog offers up another interesting book review detailing life in Ukraine during the nineties. David Zetland, The One Arm Economist’s Book Review: “Death and the Penguin“ This 1996 novel by Andrei Kurkov tells the story of a failing writer who suddenly finds himself with a full-time job writing obituaries. He also has a penguin, Misha, who he “rescues” from Kyiv’s Zoo when they run out of...

The Road Not Taken We all heterodox economists who have chosen the road ‘less traveled by’ know that this choice comes at a price. Fewer opportunities to secure ample research funding or positions at prestigious institutes or universities. Nevertheless, yours truly believes that very few of us regret our choices. One doesn’t bargain with one’s conscience. No amount of money or prestige in the world can replace the feeling of looking in the mirror and...

Last year, mRNA vaccines won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. This morning found RNA once again the recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. By the time I finished college, RNA was familiar to me as a family of biopolymers that together specified the manufacture of proteins in cells. Ribosomal RNA made up the platform and enzyme that performed the assembly of amino acids into proteins. Transfer RNAs were the small adapter...

I have expressed an appreciation before of the section in Capital on commodity fetishism. Perhaps this section stands up to a critique of Marx's theory of value. "But Marx had drawn a nightmare picture of what happened to human life under capitalism, when everything was produced only in order to be exchanged; when true qualities and uses dropped away, and the human power of making and doing itself became only an object to be traded. Then the makers and the things made turned alike into...

[unable to retrieve full-text content]"I don't think there were any non-Jewish Americans that had that visceral hatred of Islam that the Zionists had, or also the visceral hatred of Russia, specifically for anti-Semitism of past centuries, most of which was in Ukraine and Kiev, by the way. Well, that was 50 years ago, and these sanctions that Jackson introduced, the U.S. Trade, became the prototypes for today's sanctions against all the countries that the neo-cons viewed as adversaries." The...

You all down South there can wait 30 more days for additional Federal relief after hurricane Helene has done the worst seen in decades and we decide how much more you will need. “Mike Johnson’s Big Decision Could Impact Helene Relief Efforts,” MSN. Its ok, he is one of them. His $20 billion should tide you over. What an ass . . . Pre-Helene hurricane hitting land, Mike Johnson allocates $20 billion in relief funding. It now appears the Level 4...

I’ve been consistently critical of the Labor party since Anthony Albanese became leader after Labor’s narrow but unexpected loss in 2019. It’s always easy to fall prey to confirmation bias in this kind of thing, making much of the bad and ignoring the good. To check my beliefs, I’m taking a widely circulated list of Labor’s claimed achievements, and giving my own responses. This is by no means a complete list of the governments achievements, and of course it doesn’t mention failures,...

from Dean Baker It is more than a bit bizarre reading pieces that talk about automation or job-killing AI as something new and alien. These are forms of productivity growth. They allow more goods and services to be produced for each hour of human labor. Productivity growth is usually thought of as a good thing. It’s the reason that we don’t have half the U.S. workforce employed in agriculture growing our food. Instead, it is around 1.0 percent of the U.S. workforce, and we grow enough to...

Around three years ago I made a pop-up book titled Three Fragments on Machines, that contained a collection of quotes from the Grundrisse that illustrated some of the research I had been doing related to disposable time in Marx's theory. Last spring, I started work on another pop-up book showing the connection between the Grundrisse and Marx's more famous reference to forces of production, relations of production, and fetters from his Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political...