Asymptosis: always approaching
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Bleg: What Changed in the Late 70s?
Gentle readers will be aware that I look at (and graph) a lot of data sets, slicing and dicing them every which way to try and suss out how the world — or at least the economy — works. One thing I and many others keep running across is what seems to be a fundamental…
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Minimum Wage Laws are Bad for the Poor, Right? Wrong Again.
Righties love to claim that minimum-wage laws hurt the poor because they discourage employers from hiring. They claim that the disemployment effect cancels out the higher-wage effect, making the poor worse off. But over and over again, research shows that it just ain’t so. Here’s more (PDF). A new and stunningly well-executed study comparing adjacent counties…
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Fundamental Fallacies: Taxing Investments Reduces Investment
Over at Angry Bear and Presimetrics, Mike Kimel makes his usual brilliant case for the stupidity of right-wing and many orthodox economic beliefs. But he makes one statement in the course of it which he considers to be unobjectionable by all, that as far as I can tell is almost completely false. It’s one of…
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“Its not the Prius vs. the pickup truck, it’s the Prius vs. the Hummer.”
“The red-state, blue-state war is happening in the upper half of the income distribution.” Or more accurately, I think, the red-blue war is happening… And it’s happening in the poor states. And it first reared its head in the 90s. Interpret. More graphs: Andrew Gelman
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Certain Regulars Will Find this Amusing
You know who you are. No related posts.
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What ALL Americans – Liberals AND Conservatives – Want
Washington’s Blog has a good list: Break Up the Unholy Alliance Between Big Government and Big Banks “the list of prominent economists and financial experts calling for the too big to fails to be broken up is wholly bipartisan:” Throw the Criminals In Jail “Everyone agrees that financial scammers must be tried and put in…
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Did Democrats’ Policies Create Big State Budget Deficits?
Hooray. My friend Steve responded to my challenge. He posted some useless, misrepresentative data from the Wall Street Journal the other day, “showing” that blue states have bigger budget deficits, and suggesting that it’s “obviously” because of those blue-state policies. Once he’d abandoned the New-York-has-a-bigger-deficit-[in-dollars]-than-Arkansas argument, he reverted to (in my words): “New York and…
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Private Liquor Sales in Washington State: I Jumped Ship
We’ve got state liquor stores here in Washington for everything but beer and wine. I have to go to one to get booze instead of patronizing the store half a block away. I probably go five, maybe ten times a year, but I have friends who are cocktail aficionados who go far more often. I…
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One Conservative Gets It Right
Never in human history has a group so advantaged gone so far to cast itself as victim. “The Conservative Gene” by Robin A. Dembroff | Politics | The American Scene. Related posts: Choosing a VP For All the Right Reason Ratings Agencies and Real-Estate Appraisers: How Do You Keep ’em Honest? Delight and Abject Dismay…
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“Asymptotically Stagnant Activitiesâ€
When I first saw this term, I assumed they were talking about me and all the time I spend on my little blog here. (They probably should have been.) It is all about me, right? But they were actually talking about a much more interesting phenomenon: the shift in spending from “progressive” to “non-progressive” activities.…
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Tea-Party Winners Instantly Buy Into the Beltway
Staffing up with Washington insiders. Who’s not surprised? Or a better question: who is? Six real beauts. Here are three: Sen. Mike Lee (UT) – Spencer Stokes, an energy lobbyist. Sen. Rand Paul (KY) – Doug Stafford, VP of the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation Rep. Nan Hayworth (NY) — Jonathan Day, coming…
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Pacifism: Bryan Caplan Gets It (Almost) Totally Right
I often disagree with Bryan Caplan — often quite vehemently — but not always, by any means. He’s one of the people who I’m constantly testing my thinking against. He gets it so right with the following post that I’m going to make an exception (first time?) and reproduce his whole post here. Cliches of…
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Mea Culpa: Rivlin-Domenici Needs Work
I got so excited about some of the smart, obvious solutions included in the Bipartisan Policy Center’s reduce-the-deficit proposal (a.k.a. Rivlin-Domenici) that I didn’t see some of its fatal flaws. First off, it cuts Social Security, which is exactly the opposite of what we want to do: we want to make both social programs and…
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Asymptotic Freedom
I really love that term, though I just barely, maybe understand what it means. Eric Drexler (he of Engines of Creation, the breakout 1987 book on nanotech) thinks the source is very cool indeed. Here from November 7: …the most exciting paper I’ve seen on quantum field theory and gravitation in a long time. It offers…
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Fiscalists and Monetarists
Just one more example of how the left and the right are not equal ends of the spectrum. One is (at least near) the reasonable center. The other is a radical and deluded fringe — despite their numbers. I don’t think you could find a left/Keynesian/fiscalist-believing economist who would not stipulate to the spectacular, even…
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Jim Manzi Makes the Case for Doing Whatever We’re Doing Right Now — Or Nothing
I have to start this post by saying how much I like Jim’s recently-bruited notion (and coinage): “causal density.” I’ve been sharing it with my friends. In my words: An event in physics — a ball being bit by a bat and landing in center field — has very few causes, so it’s pretty easy…