Economics

Corporations and Government are Almost the Same, Except Corporations are Voluntary?

September 6, 2012 Corporations

In the midst of the political season and the political conventions, in which the role of corporations is an increasingly significant issue (no corporations are not people), David Burge, who blogs here as Iowahawkblog, tweets this: “Government” is just a word for things we do together. “Corporation” is just a word for things we do […]

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Should the Federal Reserve Lend to State and Local Governments?

June 23, 2012 Debt

Should state and local governments borrow from the Federal Reserve? Yes. Why? They’ll pay lower interest rates, thereby saving money without reducing services. The only losers will be the banks and other lenders, who are doing just fine, thank you. Should the Federal Reserve Lend to state and local governments? Yes. Why? See above. And […]

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The Health Care System in the US is Consuming its Consumers

May 31, 2012 Economics

The Health Care Cost Institute has released a new report, but which is still another reminder of why we cannot afford the US healthcare system. Last week, we pointed to a study that showed increasing dissatisfaction and increasing prices. The 2010 HCCI Health Care Cost and Utilization Report is the first report of its kind […]

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Chronically Confident Calculations

May 29, 2012 Budget

In Bias in Government Forecasts, Jeffrey Frankel, an economist at Harvard’s Kennedy School asks the question, “Why do so many countries so often wander far off the path of fiscal responsibility?” In his the full paper at the Oxford Review of Economic Policy Frankel details how national governments (with very rare exceptions) propose consistently optimistic […]

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Usually Customer Dissatisfaction Leads to Reduced Prices

May 29, 2012 Economics

Usually customer dissatisfaction leads to reduced prices … but not always in health care. Lousy care, but the price keeps going up. Didn’t we already know that? If this isn’t evidence that there are significant distortions in the healthcare market, I don’t know what might be. And if there are significant distortions in a market, […]

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Other People’s Money

May 16, 2012 Economics

The journalist character, Melissa Tregarthen in Justin Cartwright’s, Other People’s Money: “I am a number,” she writes. “I am a statistic. I am a sacrifice on the altar of the free market. I have no power, except the power of words.” This is immediately after being given the “chop,” being laid off.

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More on Too Big to Manage, Too Complex to Manage

May 16, 2012 Economics

Deep in the comments following Maureen Dowd’s Dancing with Deriviatives, on the JP Morgan Chase debacle is the following comment by Diana Moses of Arlington, MA Wasn’t there a theme in 2001: A Space Odyssey about our technological developments escaping our control (I’m thinking about HAL)? I sometimes feel that way not just about Big […]

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Too Big to Fail? Too Big to Govern. Too Big to Manage

May 11, 2012 Economics

Today’s news that JP Morgan Chase had incurred a $2 billion trading loss reminds us again of the risks to the rest of us of organizations that are not only too big to fail, but too big and complex to effectively manage. Simon Johnson, author, with James Kwak, of White House Burning, The Founding Fathers, […]

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Evidently, Some Believe That Ignorance is Better

May 10, 2012 Census

It shouldn’t be too hard to figure out where we’ll come down in this fight. With a tagline, “use the damn data,” one should probably assume that we think it’s not only important, it’s essential that we collect valid, reliable data. And it shouldn’t be a surprise that we believe that for social and economic […]

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A Nation in Decline? Commentary by Ed Luce

April 20, 2012 Economics

I’m excerpting liberally below, but you should still consider reading the original. This is a conversation that goes beyond the conventional and superficial. It’s not fun and it’s not optimistic, but if you believe that the first step required in dealing with challenges is to learn and think realistically about them, then this is worth […]

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