Nate Silver launched FiveThirtyEight this week along with a really long manifesto. In it, he attacks a lot of other journalism and especially opinion writers. This is easy to do because a lot of journalism is pretty bad, often for the reasons he provides. A number of other writers did not take kindly to Silver… Continue reading On FiveThirtyEight
Author: Matt Bruenig
Piketty on Marx
In his new book, Piketty has a rather lucid interpretation of Marx’s hypothesized “tendency of the rate of profit to fall” that also helps illuminate his hypothesis that capital’s share of income will grow in the next century. For Marx, the logic of capitalism would either cause the rate of profit to fall endlessly or… Continue reading Piketty on Marx
Piketty on Economists
From “Capital in the Twenty-First Century:” To put it bluntly, the discipline of economics has yet to get over its childish passion for mathematics and for purely theoretical and often highly ideological speculation, at the expense of historical research and collaboration with the other social sciences. Economists are all too often preoccupied with petty mathematical… Continue reading Piketty on Economists
Dumb Graph Shows Nothing
This graph purports to show an increase in regulation activity in the United States: The Federal Register is the place where administrative agencies put notices of proposed rulemaking (NPR). The assumption underlying the graph is that more pages in the Federal Register means that there are more proposed rules and therefore more regulatory activity. But… Continue reading Dumb Graph Shows Nothing
One Thing A Conservative Wrote This Week That Is Really Bad
Courtesy of Zach Beauchamp, I found my way to this really badly done piece from Ramesh Ponnuru. Here is the part Beauchamp quoted approvingly: A bigger flaw with the argument comes with Bartels’s second piece of evidence. He cites scholars at Columbia University who have concluded that Social Security, the earned income tax credit and… Continue reading One Thing A Conservative Wrote This Week That Is Really Bad