economics
stoat | October 9, 2011 I was going to write something about "occupy wall street" - I even found their statement, and was going to analyse it. But really all I was going to do was snark. So instead I'll point you at Anarchists for good government
which has the benefit of being by someone who was there. I agree with it all. Principally, with the assertion that although people think something is wrong, no-one has any idea how to put it right. And secondly, with the observation that this helps unify the protests (and the implication that the protests would fragment if there was an idea of what to do).
Updates: well,…
sciencepunk | September 14, 2011In 2007, the smash-hit game BioShock told the story of Rapture, a city built on the Atlantic seabed dedicated to the pursuit of the free market. Now academic Alexander Wissner-Gross has revealed how the race for light-speed trading could fuel the development of something remarkably similar.
High frequency trading (HFT) exploits tiny differences in the price of a commodity across two markets. As these discrepancies can last a fraction of a second, trading is carried out by computers that make thousands of transactions in milli- or even microseconds. At these speeds, the time it takes to…
stoat | September 10, 2011 According to the Economist:
Barack Obama socked it to the left on September 2nd, by backtracking on a new rule to mitigate air pollution. As proposed by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)--a hate object to many Republicans--the rule would have reduced ambient ozone, a toxic gas created by power-plant emissions and exhaust fumes, to less deadly levels than America currently permits. According to the EPA, this would by 2020 have saved up to 12,000 lives and 2.5m working days and school days lost to the toxic effect of ozone on American lungs each year. It would also have cost polluters…
mikethemadbiologist | August 29, 2011One of the ludicrous notions that has infected our political discourse is that government jobs aren't 'real' jobs (tell that to fireman when your house is burning down...). But a lot of private sector jobs are heavily subsidized by the government. I'm not referring to private contractors hired by the government, but jobs that are supposedly private sector. Low wage private sector jobs. How are these jobs subsidized? Food stamps (now known as SNAP; italics mine):
Saucedo, who earns $9.70 an hour for about 26 hours a week and lives with her mother, is one of the many Americans who survive…
mikethemadbiologist | August 25, 2011...imaginary jobs that might or might not materialize. As a long-time customer of New Balance shoes (not only do I like the shoes, but they're U.S. made), it looks like a 'free'* trade agreement will kill off 1,000 existing jobs in Maine (italics mine):
At the factory here owned by New Balance, the last major athletic shoe brand to manufacture footwear in the United States, even workers on the shop floor recognize that in purely economic terms, the operation doesn't make sense.
The company could make far more money if, like Nike and Adidas, it shifted virtually all of these jobs to low-wage…
mikethemadbiologist | August 15, 2011One of the points about science funding I've tried to make over the years (we have been blogging a long time, haven't we?) is that the overheads and indirect costs associated with federal grants drive a lot of university decisions--there's a lot of money there. But this funding also has significant macroeconomic effects, especially in research-heavy states like Massachusetts. A local paper, The Boston Courant, describes the effects of the coming NIH cuts, due to the ending of the ARRA and the coming budget cuts, to the Boston economy. I'm quoting extensively from the August 12, 2001…
mikethemadbiologist | August 12, 2011If our mainstream political discourse is to be believed, the U.S. 'doesn't make anything anymore.' We should all become 'knowledge workers', constantly reinvent our personal brand. Manufacturing--and the engineering it takes to support efficient manufacturing processes--are anachronisms. Hell, everything these days in made in China, right?
But like most popular economic bromides, this is utter bullshit that is completely contradicted by those damn facts. From the SF Fed:
The market share of foreign goods is highest in durables, which include cars and electronics. Two-thirds of U.S.…
drorzel | August 10, 2011There are two recent studies of gender disparities in science and technology (referred to by the faintly awful acronym "STEM") getting a lot of play over the last few days. As is often the case with social-science results, the data they have aren't quite the data you would really like to have, and I think it's worth poking at them a little, not to deny the validity of the results, but to point out the inherent limitations of the process.
The first is a study of lifetime earnings in various fields that includes this graph showing that women with a Ph.D. earn about the same amount as men with a…
mikethemadbiologist | August 3, 2011I do so wish we still had Democrats who bring the righteous thunder instead of sounding like mealy-mouth technocrats (although "Satan-sandwich" was kinda funny). Sadly, you're stuck with me instead.
Anyway, by way of Bill Mitchell, we come across a report (pdf) that has the rather dry title of "The "Jobless and Wageless" Recovery from the Great Recession of 2007-2009: The Magnitude and Sources of Economic Growth Through 2011 I and Their Impacts on Workers, Profits, and Stock Values." But I assure you it tells a story that will raise your blood pressure. While there are a couple 'abused…
mikethemadbiologist | August 2, 2011Actually, it will probably be several decades. While details of the budget ceiling negotations haven't been released, the initial reports sound pretty awful, with $2.4 trillion of cuts over ten years with $1 trillion in discretionary cuts (that's stuff like NIH and NSF, by the way). It's pretty clear, at this point, that Obama wants massive cuts to happen, in part because he doesn't really understand how the deficits arose:
While I am reporting this, I should note that the President made news regarding his understanding of the origins of the deficit and our slow growth recently when he…
mikethemadbiologist | July 30, 2011With apologies to RFK. Cullen Roche makes a cogent observation about the state of economics:
It is based too much on pie in the sky thinking and not based on what is happening on the ground, in the trenches. Warren Mosler, widely regarded as the founder of MMT, created the theory because he was in the trenches and recognized that what his textbooks taught him did not reflect the reality of the operations he was involved in on a daily basis. And while no economic theory is perfect, I think this is by far MMT's greatest strength. We can all theorize about how best to implement our…
sastyk | July 29, 2011I have a pretty good track record on the economic crisis. In 2007, I pointed out that the "slowdown" that people were saying was absolutely not a recession, was, in fact, a recession. In 2008, I pointed out that most major economic downturns of the past century haven't been very brief - although technically the 1970s economic crisis consisted of two recessions, rather than one, you could just as easily observe that it consisted of a decade or so of high unemployment, economic stagnation, etc...etc... I argued that it was likely that the major economic crisis we were finally acknowledging…
mikethemadbiologist | July 25, 2011I'm holding off on a couple of genomics posts, and instead wearing my Mike the Mad Post-Keynesian hat, since global financial system might get...shaky. During the ongoing pandimensional clusterfuck that is the debt ceiling negotiations, one thing that is used to bolster the prophecies of budgetary DOOOM!! is the CBO (Congressional Budget Office) estimates. These estimates lead to claims that future budget deficits are 'unsustainable.' We must therefore make Grandma eat catfood cut funding for the disabled and needy engage in fiscal austerity.
But, as I've noted many times about Social…
mikethemadbiologist | July 23, 2011While one should never underestimate the rampant stupidity and batshitloonitarianism of the psychiatric wing of the Republican Party (which seems to be its dominant wing), I think Bill Mitchell's take on the whole fiasco is dead on target:
With regard to the debt ceiling it is clear that there will be a "last minute" compromise and the last several weeks will have just served to demonstrate the appalling self-serving nature of American politics driven by deep ideological disregard for the underprivileged (including the unemployed).
It really is remarkable how there has been no discussion…
mikethemadbiologist | July 22, 2011As with history in general, I suppose the victors write--or rewrite--economic history too. One of the arguments for balancing budgets that's floating around is that Clinton got us a surplus, times were good, and therefore, we should do it again. Of course, things were better for some people, including those at the bottom (which is a worthwhile gain), but most of the spoils went to those at the top. As the joke went, "Clinton has created millions of jobs, and I'm working three of them." Snark aside, the reason why Clinton was able to lower the debt was no mystery: private sector debt…
mikethemadbiologist | July 15, 2011One of the most frustrating things about Obama's playing the role of The Great Conciliator is his belief that we should 'look forward, not back', that there should be no accountability for those who have failed or committed fraud. Leaving aside notions of justice (which these days is best for one's sanity), this idiotic belief allows the incompetent and the malfeasant to continue their harmful activities. Case in point: the financial rating agencies. These are the bozos who went along with Wall Street's alchemy wherein shitty loans were magically turned into AAA securities (the highest…
mikethemadbiologist | July 15, 2011We should be worrying about the employment deficit. Instead, we are worried about the budget deficit. But I'm getting ahead of myself. Nate Silver has a very good post detailing how the Republicans in Congress have positioned themselves to the right of....everybody. But what struck me is that nowhere in the poll would one have even been given the option of responding that the budget deficit is not a serious problem (really, look it up. You can't answer that).
I want to nip one common complaint in the bud: if our GDP-debt ratio soars, no one will buy our debt (T-bills). This is…
stoat | July 13, 2011 Ripping off Timmy:
Laptops and mobile phones mean that at least a modicum of work can be done while travelling. So the value of time saved by fewer hours travelling should fall. In fact, we can almost certainly go further. Sitting with a laptop, a phone and a decent internet connection in a comfy seat on a train is, these days, almost as productive as being in a nice office in a comfy chair with a computer, phone and decent internet connection.
In which case the value of the reduced transport time for these very important people collapses down to almost nothing. Something which rather…
mikethemadbiologist | July 9, 2011So GOP Senator Orrin Hatch has decided to embrace his inner douchebag:
"I hear how they're so caring for the poor and so forth," Hatch said in remarks on the Senate floor Wednesday, in reference to Democrats. "The poor need jobs! And they also need to share some of the responsibility."
...But it was Hatch whose remarks Wednesday raised the idea that the wealthy are already doing too much, even as the nation's effective tax rates are at modern lows since the Bush administration slashed rates in 2001 and 2003. In his view, it seems, the middle class and poor should be picking up the slack.
"…
mikethemadbiologist | July 9, 2011A while ago, I discussed the record low rate of male employment in the U.S. Well, Mike Konczal also has that figure (why read anyone but the Mad Biologist. We are always firstest...). But he notes some other jarring data:
You have to go back to pre-1988 to find an era when there were a fewer percentage of women working than there are right now.
You've come a long way, baby. If you have a job, things suck too:
Meanwhile, how's the economy working out for those with jobs? Average weekly earnings of all private employees dropped from $791.20 to $788.56. We can't really have an inflationary…