Tag: Economics

The JOBS bill before the Senate doesn’t actually, you know, create any jobs.  In fact, according to MIT economist Simon Johnson, it’s likely to destroy jobs. Professor John Coates hit the nail on the head: “While the various proposals being considered have been characterized as promoting jobs and economic growth…

This will unlikely come as a surprise to anyone, but the Masters of the Universe are 10x more likely to be clinical psychopaths than the general population.  I know, I know… shocking…

Good news for the US economy on the trucking front (not so much for Wisconsin, though): The American Trucking Associations’ advanced seasonally adjusted (SA) For-Hire Truck Tonnage Index jumped 6.8% in December after rising 0.3% in November 2011.  The latest gain put the SA index at 124.5 (2000=100) in December,…

Marxist writers are often vitriolic and prone to hyperbole when discussing their favorite subject: Capitalism.  Slavoj Žižek is not one of those guys.  He is a dialectical-materialist philosopher and researcher at the Birkbeck School of Law, University of London.  In the latest issue of The London Review of Books he…

With a correlation of .56, it appears the higher the union membership in a state, the higher that state’s GDP.  Imagine that… Contrary to the wingnut talking point that “unions destroy prosperity,” the exact opposite seems to hold. Data is such a bitch… Some Fun Observations: Lower-Left = Red States…

Noah Smith, one of my favorite economics bloggers, produced a list of 7 principles you need to know when arguing with economists.  Many of them are generally applicable to arguing with “experts” in general.  Well worth a look. My favorite principle is one that I will call “The Krugman Principle.”…

Economics has real, unpleasant, even destructive consequences for the people of the world. Over the last three decades, economists played an important role in creating the conditions of the 2008 crisis (and dozens of smaller financial crises that came before it since the early 1980s, such as the 1982 Third…

The only issue that matters in the 2012 election is the income disparity between rich and poor.  And the fact that, as a whole, people are not seeing the benefits of the growth in GDP. That red line is 1980 (about) when America embarked on a reckless experiment with supply-side…

The Health Insurance Industry and 2B2F Banking… Dylan Ratigan is my new hero.

It’s no wonder they need to set new ethical guidelines for academic economists who want to publish.  They’ve been captured by business interests.