On the heels of my post on upward mobility comes an insightful post by Cato’s Michael Tanner. Two key quotations: In the end, however, one has to ask a more basic question. Why do we care about inequality at all? Poverty, of course, is a bad thing. But is inequality? After all, if we doubled [...]

I read an interesting article on economic mobility in National Review Online, which got me thinking. The article is good in that it points out some of the statistical challenges in measuring upward mobility. For example, who counts as poor? Who counts as middle class? Are we measuring intergenerational or intragenerational mobility? In acknowledging these [...]

You know times are bad when large corporations start accepting advertising money to do product placement in their web chat tech support sessions. For example: “Thank you, I’ve found your account information.  While I’m looking up your account info, be sure to check out _____, where you can meet friends, play games, etc.” That just [...]

A number of people have asked me lately what I’m reading on economics and the financial markets right now.  Truth is, I’m always reading such things, and no short list can even come close to covering the variety of material I try to read, from the scholarly and serious (e.g., Posner, Becker, Mankiw, etc.) to [...]

When the Bank of England does anything for the first time – it’s 315 years old this year, after all – it’s worth noting.

I am glad to live in Texas, and glad I do not live in New York.

My favorite new (but not new favorite) blog is Evil Speculator (tagline, “bent on market domination, one nefarious trade at a time”). It posted a fantastic and disturbing chart from Gold-Eagle. The chart is one of the best demonstrations I’ve seen of a concept called the “slope of hope.” The idea is that (in significant [...]

Wow, look at it go. For reference: this is only 8 days after the $7.4 trillion estimate and only 14 days after the $4.284 trillion estimate. That’s $4,216,000,000,000 in two weeks. If you really want a fright, keep reading. If we were to keep spending at this rate through the first 100 days of the [...]

That’s what the Fed is pledging to “rescue the financial system,” according to Bloomberg.com. That’s 50% of 2007 GDP, or 288% of 2007 federal tax revenues. Makes my prior post sound look like a praise of good budgeting.

That’s what the so-called “financial crisis” of 2008 has cost the federal government directly… so far.* Wonder how that stacks up to other crises? CNBC has a slideshow showing the costs (inflation-adjusted) of some of the biggest government projects ever. There are many events not listed in that slide show, of course. Two of the [...]