28 February 2018

The Terribly Boring Headline That Won't Generate Any Outrage or Clicks: Income Mobility in the US is Not So Bad

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The economist Raj Chetty of Stanford was in San Diego 27 February talking about income mobility. He's exploring a really important topic...
18 February 2018

A Failure of Empathy and the Preposterous Notion of 197 Shootings in Legislatures in the First 18 Years of This Century

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"We all are born with a certain package. We are who we are: where we were born, who we were born as, how we were raised. We're k...
16 February 2018

The Switch That Triggered the Rise of the West (Can Also Be Switched Off)

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"I am not an advocate for frequent changes in laws and constitutions, but laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progres...
06 February 2018

Shout it - Yellen was Flawless at the Fed (Hopefully It Won't Be Another Century Before Another Woman is Fed Chair)

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This Monday was our first day with Janet Yellen as Fed Chair in four years. The market marked her departure with the biggest ever one day dr...
01 February 2018

General Intelligence and General Stupidity - Smart People Know the Difference

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As an old guy I've given up on the notion of meeting someone who is brilliant. So, if I'm told that someone is brilliant, I want to ...
22 January 2018

The Trick is Finding Someone Whose Unusual Interest in Dwarfs Has Forced Them to Sell Their Art

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From the early 1500s to early 1600s, the English destroyed a lot of art. Perhaps as much as 98% of their paintings and statues as part of t...
05 January 2018

The Real Culprits in the Trump Presidency

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We've watched a year of extreme incompetence in Trump's presidency. Not only does he not understand trade or war or trade wars or an...
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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...