economics – Post Tenebras Lux

How We Roll

ByLars May 24, 2020 0 Comments

I use a nifty little service called Nuzzel, which allows you to create a semi-curated news page of links from your own Twitter feed. If more than a couple of people all share the same link in your feed, Nuzzel picks it up as important enough to show to you in this curated news feed. It’s a great way to see what people whose opinions you value are talking about, and to keep from missing articles...

Judgment Day Coming To Kansas?

ByLars July 2, 2014 0 Comments

Are the chickens going to be coming home to roost in Kansas this fall? A new SurveyUSA poll suggests it's a strong possibility: Brownback is fighting for his life. Democratic challengers Paul Davis and Jill Docking today lead the former U.S. Senator and current Governor, 47% to 41%. 1 in 4 registered Republicans today defects and votes for the Davis/Docking Democratic ticket. By contrast,...

What A Democrat Sounds Like

ByLars April 4, 2014 0 Comments

You'll be unsurprised to see the face featured in the video below, but I don't care. After decades of incrementalism, technocracy, cringing from real or perceived GOP attacks, and corporation worship starting with the DLC and moving on to Third Way (still so maddeningly evident today even at the highest levels), it's both bracing and probably usefully instructive to get a full-blast reminder...

Solving The Wrong Problem

ByLars October 15, 2013 1 Comment

On Twitter, economist Justin Wolfers links us to this article in the New York Times by a game theoretician, proposing new ways for us to think about and perhaps solve the problem of the constant debt ceiling standoffs and the attendant negative effects that occur as a result of them. The article’s author, David McAdams, is apparently also the author of a forthcoming book on how game theory can...

Free Market Hates 'Teachers With Guns'

ByLars July 7, 2013 2 Comments

After the atrocity at Sandy Hook, and with school shootings on the rise, conservatives (no doubt feeling a bit on the defensive) trotted out a two-pronged argument. Part one was the notion that most shootings happen in "gun free zones" like schools and churches and malls, etc. This part of the argument is ludicrous all on its own, but requires a separate post to do it justice. The second part...

Talking With The Congressman About Poetry — Er, Tax Reform

ByLars May 9, 2013 0 Comments

Ever since I moved in 2003 from Barbara Lee's district in Oakland, CA to Tom Price's district in suburban Atlanta (Newt Gingrich's old district), I've sort of felt a stepped-up need to interface with my congressperson. In Oakland, I could pretty much rest easy in the knowledge that my congressperson would propose or vote for issues that I myself would support, were I in congress. No politician...

Fiscal NIMBYism

ByLars February 26, 2013 1 Comment

3/2 - see update at bottom* Pew Research is out with another poll, this time focused on budgetary and financial issues, given the upcoming sequester, and the results are depressingly predictable. The title alone gives away the findings almost completely: As Sequester Deadline Looms, Little Support for Cutting Most Programs (pdf). The key graph is here: This is the quandary American politics - no,...

IMF (Politely) Confirms: Austerity Doesn't Work

ByLars October 11, 2012 1 Comment

Wow, it just doesn't get much more stark than this. Via Paul Krugman: On Tuesday, the International Monetary Fund came out with a new report which states, albeit in dry, fact-based bureaucratese, that the world's governments (particularly though not exclusively those in the Eurozone) ought not continue down the path of fiscal consolidation (debt-reduction), lest they risk slowing the world's...

Grand Old Marxists

ByLars August 28, 2012 0 Comments

What Timothy Snyder said.

Magnificent And Depressing

ByLars August 27, 2012 0 Comments

This got posted up while I was on vacation in San Francisco, so I missed it. Luckily, someone in my Twitter stream was still posting it up today, so it didn't completely pass me by. It's a graph from Pew Social Trends Report by way of The Atlantic, of the last sixty years of economic activity in America. All of it. Of course, any graph that tries to represent such an incredibly large amount of...