In my series on growth, decline, or stagnation of Economic health I focused on the U.S.'s measure of economic health (GDP) for a 60 year period from post WWII beginning 1950 through 2010. In the prior notes I showed that the US's 10 year annual compound growth GDP grew for 33 years from 1950 through 1983 and then began a long ...
I have occasionally discussed the ultimate likely effect of automation and robotics on society. There are also, I'm told, some 'sci-fi' stories that play on the same theme. The context of the effects relates to the relative positions of capital and labor.
Consider that ...
A 10 yr GDP growth rate chart (1929-2010) is shown by Krugman in this post. His point was that, since 1929, other than WWII period there has never been a 10 year period of ...
Dean Baker's article describes the lack of deficit hawks to reconcile their reasoning for reducing the deficit with the facts and economic ...
I have several reasons for not contributing to the charity, most related to my general and vehement opposition to charities of almost any kind in the first place... and most specifically those related to religous and/or health related charities. Another reason though is that I am a firm believer in a person's free choice and ...
A bit more about my opposition to tax policy regards charities, this time related to it's regressive nature. Data published by the IRS shows the non-cash contributions by income group and donation catagory. This illustrates very clearly that the higher income catagories benefit by far the most in terms of deductions for ...
Here's a pretty picture (pie chart) showing the breakdown of tax deductable charitable contributions by type of recipiant organization. Notably, the largest giving occurs by far to religious groups... fully 1/3rd of all charitable donations go to religion.
Now why do I get the impression that 1st Amendment ...
From Reuter's article today:
The Philadelphia Federal Reserve Bank's business activity index, which measures Mid-Atlantic factory activity, ...
cashiers, etc... being more productive with technological advances. This component of employment is 10.5% of the workforce in 2008 (on average).... but retail sales workers comprise only 5.8% of the workforce... the remainder are sales representatives (insurance, advertising, & securities for the most ...
The crux of the article is that business's have been, are now and inceasingly will depend on fewer "workers" ... depending more and more on employees with higher levels of education. The author recognizes ...
If you're a regular reader of Krugman's blog you''ve no doubt noticed his laments over time that most economists and especially financial policy makers "just don't get it", despite all the evidence to date that they've gotten it all wrong. His message in his blogs is that the economic policy's that have been pursued since the ...
Basically, he says there's no good reason for Obama and Democrats to negotiate reductions in spending on social programs in return for GOP votes to raise the debt ceiling. Why no good reason? Because if it came right down to the wire Wall Street is the one that would suffer the most in the long term if the US defaulted ...
From his post 6/28/11 The Old Superstition
"I was originally going to end this post by saying something about stupidity, but that's not right: the people at the BIS aren't stupid. What's going on here is something different and worse: we're seeing the desire for ...