Government Shutdown Once Again Shows the Lies Behind Deficit Hysteria
How the wealthy use deficit scaremongering to keep wages down and stave off calls for more investment and social spending.
Read more...Category Archives: Dubious statistics
Why Is The Shale Industry Still Not Profitable?
A careful parsing of shale industry performance data indicates that the industry’s claims of productivity gains are overstated.
Read more...Fiduciary Counsel Ashley Dunning Encourages CalPERS to Muscle Actuary to Change His Forecasts of Funding Needs
How CalPERS’ fiduciary counsel encouraged its board to pressure its actuary to produce more politically-convenient results.
Read more...5 Ways Capitalist Logic Has Sabotaged the Scientific Community
A useful short list on how commercial and competitive pressures have undermined good scientific practice.
Read more...How Money Won Trump the White House
Contrary to media reports, Trump made significant contributions to his Presidential campaign.
Read more...A US Economic Boom in 2018?
Not that it comes as a surprise, but talk of the US economy being in a boom is hype.
Read more...Debunking Mainstream Economists on Secular Stagnation and the Loanable Funds Fallacy
An important, accessible takedown of the loanable funds theory, on which a ton of bad policy rests.
Read more...Bill Black: DSGE Dilettantes v. ADM God Devotees
Black shows how DSGE defenses fall apart, even as their backers lash out at critics.
Read more...Student Loan Defaults Approach 5 Million….Using a Very Permissive Definition of “Default”
The latest sighting on the student loan front is not pretty, and would be even uglier if the right metrics were used.
Read more...MIT Professor Angrist Publishes Obviously Misleading Analysis of Uber Driver Economics….With Uber Chief Economist as Co-Author
More Uber boosterism masquerading as analysis.
Read more...Japan’s Tight Labor Market Generates Deflation…
Puzzling over Japan’s super low unemployment with continued deflation.
Read more...New Paper Debunks Desperate Rationalization for Private Equity: Lower Volatility Based on Bogus Valuations
A new paper by Jeff Hooke and Ken Yook of John Hopkins argues that “smoothed,” as in phony, private equity valuations are misleading.
Read more...Nothing Natural About the Natural Rate of Unemployment
Lambert here: “Natural” is indeed one of those words you should watch out for (like “we”). As in, for instance, “natural disaster.” And, of course, the Natural Rate of Unemployment (NAIRU). It’s often amusing to replace “natural” with “artificial”; generally there’s no loss of meaning, and often additional clarity is induced. By Edmund Phelps, the […]
Read more...That’s Not MY Greenhouse Gas!
Climate pacts like the Paris Accord do little because they focus on in-country greenhouse gas emissions, not ones based on consumption.
Read more...Extreme Poverty Cut in Half? Only in the Minds of the Capitalists
The much-touted fall in extreme poverty is more the result of bad or cherry-picked metrics than real progress.
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