29 December 2017

Why You Should Never Loan Money to - or Vote for - Someone Who Invokes God

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I just finished Seth Stephens-Davidowitz's fascinating book, Everybody Lies . One of the ideas behind this is that we are more likely to...
23 December 2017

Trying to Make Sense of Why Republicans Can't Make Sense of Deficits

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It's not clear whether Republicans have given up on caring about the economy or if their ideology blinds them to what even sharp high sc...
19 December 2017

Returns Without Risk - The Republicans Vision of Banking Reform And How It Makes Recessions Worse

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Matt Yglesias at Vox reports on the extent to which Republicans are changing laws to profit them and their donors. In the midst of this lis...
18 December 2017

Ron's Economic Forecast for 2018 - Highest Probability of a Recession in 8 Years

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A Chinese recession? A bumbling Fed Chair? A downturn in stocks? Your blogger predicts a 33% chance of bad news for the American economy in...
15 December 2017

Your Blogger's Forecast Record for the Last 2 Years - 2016 and 2017

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Some years I make forecasts for the coming year. This is a blog so there is nothing standard about what metrics I forecast but here is a rec...
04 December 2017

What Our Oldest Story Tells us About What it Means to be Human - Greenblatt on Gilgamesh

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All of this is taken from Stephen Greenblatt's new book The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve. This is a blog post rather than a book chapte...
02 December 2017

Why the Republican Tax Cuts Won't Help the Economy: Understanding the Difference Between the Economies and Parties of Lincoln and Trump

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Trillions in excess reserves, cash and negative interest rate bonds calls into question Republican's claim that the economy needs tax cu...
24 November 2017

The Economic Effects of the Republican Tax Plan - Punishing Work and Rewarding Luck

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Although the Republican tax plan has been - and still is - evolving it has recently included changes that would tax innovation in two forms....
16 November 2017

Some Thoughts on Sex Scandals, Politics, Culture and Consent

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As I write this, Twitter is a twitter about sex. At least for the accounts I follow, that's unusual. The two big stories are Roy Moore...
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03 November 2017

We're Getting Older, Fewer are Working and GDP Growth is Slowing: Next Decade's Economy in 4 Simple Graphs

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In October, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released a report forecasting some key numbers for the next decade. You can find it here . Here...
02 November 2017

Evaluating the Fed's First Woman Chair: How Labor and Stock Markets Performed During Janet Yellen's Tenure

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The U.S. got its first Federal Reserve Chair in 1914. 100 years later the first woman was appointed to Chair the Fed. Now, after she has ser...

Freud, Jung, Hidden Impulses, the Collective Unconscious, Hitler, Putin, Conspicuous Consumption and - Finally - Community

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Freud's Couch Was Sort of a Bed About a century ago two competing models for modern media emerged in the U.S. and Germany. Using wha...
01 November 2017

Bot Puppets

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In the 2016 election, bots were busily posting and reposting weird memes to people who confused cynicism with sophistication, people who fou...

The Most Overlooked Reason for Growing Polarization in Congress

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An interesting study here depicts how little overlap there is in voting in Congress compared to what it was decades ago. As you can see...

George Carlin's Driving Test Applied to Income and Politics

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"Have you ever noticed that anybody  driving slower  than you is an  idiot , and anyone going  faster  than you is a maniac?" -  G...