Ooof, talk about dispelling the illusion that anyone will take care of the aged. There has been ample comment about the need to reform Social Security. However, the real problem on the retirement entitlements front is Meidcare. Paul Krugman and Dean Baker, among others, have pointed out at length that alarming increases forecast for Medicare […]
Read more...Ben Stein is up to his old tricks. Here he gave the impression of being done for the year, having penned an article of a classic end of year type, “what I should do better next year.” But he snuck another piece in this week, “Tattered Standard of Duty on Wall Street.” The article claims […]
Read more...Martin Wolf, the Financial Times’ highly regarded economics editor, looks at a fundamental and troubling issue in his latest article, “The dangers of living in a zero-sum world economy.” From the Industrial Revolution onward, the world has enjoyed economic growth, producing rising living standards and making possible an extension of democracy (Wolf argues that the […]
Read more...Yesterday I posted a lead from a reader complaining about a holiday party that Freddie Mac hosted, the objetcion being it was inappropriately splashy (the reader used, and I repeated, the overwrought “decadent”) given that Freddie is losing quite a lot of money these days ($2 billion last quarter, almost certainly the same this quarter, […]
Read more...Cultural myths die hard. Even though a study in Science earlier this year found that men and women uttered nearly the same number of words in a day, yet women are widely perceived to be more chatty. My pet theory is that men see themselves as talking about things that are necessary and important, like […]
Read more...New York Times writer David Leonhardt, in “When Trust in an Expert Is Unwise,” cites a small scale study of car mechanics that suggests that so-called experts often aren’t very skilled, and also too often prescribe inappropriate and costly remedies to simple problems. Leonhardt suggests that the study’s findings can be generalized to fields like […]
Read more...The article below, from the 12 Angry Men Blog, mourns the dumbing down of home chemistry kits. One has to wonder at these heavy-handed efforts to contain threats, particularly in a society that lacks gun controls. Are we next going to make styrofoam a controlled substance, since mixed with gas, it produces a decent napalm […]
Read more...This article by George Monbiot, “Libertarians are the True Social Parasites,” is priceless. It illustrates the sort of behavior discussed in longer form in Dean Baker’s book, The Conservative Nanny State, namely, of diehard critics of government intervention who nevertheless want a handout when their enterprise goes bad. Note I refrained from including the extensive […]
Read more...I’ve debated for a couple of days about posting this item, but since it was still nagging at me, I figured it was sufficiently interesting to be worthy of your attention. By way of background, Frank Abagnale of book and later movie “Catch Me if You Can” fame, can lay claim to having been one […]
Read more...An excellent post, courtesy Mark Thoma at Economist’s View, from FactCheck.org, on why its efforts to correct the record are too often counterproductive. In essence, if ideas are falsely linked (say “Saddam Hussein” and “Al Queda”), further discussion preserves the false association. The entire post is very much worth reading; it’s a primer on how […]
Read more...Marguerite Yourcenar’s Memoirs of Hadrian contains a stunning line: “I begin to discern the profile of my death.” The news of this evening has given me the perhaps mistaken impression that the end game of this credit crunch is similarly coming into view. Before, it seemed an open question as to what measures would be […]
Read more...I must be losing perspective to think this has anything to do with the MLEC rescue proposal. From the BBC: Chimpanzees under attack exaggerate their screams to get help from higher ranking group members, researchers from Fife have discovered.The study found primates produce high-pitched and prolonged screams when they were the victims of severe aggression […]
Read more...A very good item at the Huffington Post by Al Norman, “Wal-Mart: America’s Tax Deadbeat,” which describes the lengths the Bentonville company goes to in order to cut its local property tax assessments. This story in essence elaborates on a piece that appeared in the New York Times earlier in the week. The issue here […]
Read more...An article in eFinance Directory, citing the FBI 2006 Mortgage Fraud Report, reports that mortgage fraud played a role in as many as 70% of early payment defaults. The type of fraud wasn’t specified, but one assumes it was mainly overstatement of income. As the story notes: A study of more than 3 million mortgage […]
Read more...Time for some lighter weekend fare…
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