Since Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates has increasingly shifted his focus from his technology enterprise to his charity, the William and Melinda Gates Foundation, he has also had time to clarify and refine his objectives. Unlike the super-wealthy of the past, whose giving typically has been motivated by a combination of enhancing their prestige (often revealed […]
Read more...If by some bizarre happenstance you do not know who Eric Hobsbawm is, it is never too late to find out. The Guardian’s website reported on a recent lecture he made on the declining role of empires. It’s a testament to the stature of the 89 year old Marxist historian that he was invited to […]
Read more...An article in the New York Review of Books, “The Specter Haunting Your Office,” discusses three books, one by Louis Uchitelle, The Disposable American, meaning the disposable employee; one by Greg LeRoy, on the way corporations play states and muncipalities to extract economic concessions; and one by John Bogle, on “managers’ capitalism” and how it […]
Read more...As a matter of proper usage, I doubt that one can parse bullshit. Bullshit, by nature, comes in big blobs of varying degrees of firmness, depending on the diet of the bull of origin, while parsing is an analytic activity. The inherent unsuitability of bullshit as raw material for logical or syntactical scrutiny is probably […]
Read more...The headline above isn’t news per se, but someone reputable, in this case, Matt Fellowes and Mia Mabanta, have done the sleuth work of putting together the data to dimension the problem. The report says that the bottom quintile is “awash” with credit and now is one of the fastest growing segments. Ee found this […]
Read more...Mark Thoma’s blog featured The Commonwealth Fund’s latest comparative survey of health care in six countries – Australia, Canada, Germany, New Zealand, the UK and the US – and the US comes out dead last. Having lived in Australia, which gets a rank of 3 at a cost less than half of America’s (also true […]
Read more...According Robert Cringely at PBS, IBM is cutting at least 150,000 US jobs in its Global Services Division, and each US worker is to be replaced by a new overseas hire. This headcount cut, called Project Lean, bears out the populist view that corporate executives are greedy and outsourcing damages the American economy. As we […]
Read more...Interestingly, after a some robust debate among Serious Economists at Mark Thoma’s blog, Economist’s View, on the merits of trade (even Krugman contributed via e-mail), a study taking the opposite view appears at Economic Policy Institute. The study argues that millions of jobs have been lost to China. Its methodology looks reasonable. Mark Thoma was […]
Read more...The debate among some serious academics on the economic models, their merits, and what they say about who might win or lose from trade continued over the weekend. While informative, it was also oriented heavily towards theory. Dani Rodrik tries to sum up: Can we all agree on these? 1.Trade policy works through its effect […]
Read more...Australian economist John Quiggin posted a high level event chart of the how Seriously Bad scenarios might play themselves out (from a talk by sustainability expert Chris Moran) and what the policy response might be. It includes probability estimates from 80 students. However, as the chart shows, the rational calculus doesn’t bode well for forestalling […]
Read more...There is quiet distress within the Democratic Party that the need to rein in the burgeoning Bush deficits will severely limit their ability to tackle issues near and dear to their heart, such as health care. As Mark Thoma reports in “Democrats and Deficits,” citing Brad Plumer of the New Republic and Greg Anrig, Nobel […]
Read more...Alan Reynolds has become income inequality’s analogue to a global warming denier. Even after Fed chairman Ben Bernanke and President Bush have acknowledged that income disparity has increased, Reynolds is still fighting a rearguard action. He wrote a series of articles, starting with a Wall Street Journal comment last December, arguing against the widely-cited finding […]
Read more...The Financial Times reports today on a report prepared by 11 retired US admirals and generals on the security implications of global warming. The authors concluded that global warming would worsen regional conflicts, worsen living standards, and undermine stability. These findings are consistent with earlier reports that discussed the large-scale dislocation that would result from […]
Read more...Although it hasn’t gotten much attention in the business press yet, the House Financial Services Committee is on the warpath to clean up subprime mortgage lending. Most of their ideas, such as tighter regulation of mortgage brokers, strike observers as reasonable. But one has created a great deal of alarm. The concept is “assignee liability,” […]
Read more...So far, it hasn’t gotten much attention in the mainstream business press, but Bloomberg and the Financial Times are very much on top of the story: the House Financial Services Committee is moving forward with proposals to impose new regulations on subprime lending. And Democrats and Republicans are largely on the same page. There are […]
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