For decades, citizens have been sold on the mantra that the hungry private sector can do a better and cheaper job of providing services than “inefficient” government.
Read more...Nothing could have been a more potent metaphor for the current investment climate than the headline, “Macau gambling revenue hits record $45 bn in 2013.”
Read more...Mexico is doing badly at feeding its own people, thanks to 20 years of NAFTA.
Read more...As most people who have passing familiarity with student debt in the US know, it’s a millstone that is brutally difficult to remove. But it turns out that even the limited ways out are often not available in practice thanks to the hyper-aggressive conduct of a key government contractor.
Read more...The problem of who should bear the costs of climate-change-induced rises in flood frequency in coastal communities is difficult even before throwing in the not-trivial problem that is it also highly politicized.
Read more...Yves here. While I suspect the general thesis of this post will appeal to many readers, I’m bothered by the use of “price” and “purchase” to describe the idea that progress is not linear and in many respects may add up to less in terms of satisfaction than we’d like to believe.
Read more...If you are in New York City, I hope you’ll join us next Wednesday, from 6:00 PM till 8:30 PM.
Read more...You must watch this talk, even if some parts are a bit technical for mere mortals. No matter how bad you think the NSA’s information surveillance and capture is, I can just about guarante that this will show you that it’s an order of magnitude worse than you imagined.
Read more...Yves here. This essay achieves the difficult task of working through some of the implications of Arrow’s impossibility theorem, which might alternatively be called “the inescapability of politics theorem” in an accessible manner. In fact, one of the conclusions that the author Raphaële Chappe focuses on is that how well a society “does politics” matters, that the structure and health of institutions matter. Thus it’s perverse that economics, which readers of this blog understand full well is really political economy, has virtually no interest in questions of governance (the closest it comes is in principal/agent and game theory and information asymmetry).
Read more...Apparently, it has been impossible to sell Greece any weapons at all, not even a water pistol, without bribing officials at the Defense Ministry. Corruption is so pandemic that Transparency International awarded Greece once again the dubious honor of being the most corrupt country in the EU. For 2013, Greece ended up in 80th place of the 177 countries in the survey, same as China. But it takes two to tango.
Read more...A new Bloomberg story, Americans on Wrong Side of Income Gap Run Out of Means to Cope, is a zeitgeist indicator: the normally-well-insulated-from-realty investing classes have noticed that large swathes of what was once the middle class aren’t just downwardly mobile but are struggling.
Read more...f you come to San Francisco or Silicon Valley and look around, you’d arrive at the conclusion that California is booming, that companies jump through hoops to hire people, that they douse them with money, stock options, and free lunches. But in the rest of the state, the picture isn’t that rosy.
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