No Apparent Motive

I spoke this morning at an event hosted by the Congressional “Out of Poverty” Caucus. The main points I tried to make were: (1) in the short-term, the best way to bring down the poverty rate (currently over 14 percent) is to put America back to work; but (2) that is not enough –the national […]

My review of Stephen J. Rose’s Rebound: Why America Will Emerge Stronger From the Financial Crisis, in the current issue of Challenge, is now available online. Spoiler Alert: Rose thinks that the US economy –Great Recession, aside– is three-quarters full. My view is that, even Great Recession aside, the economy is three-quarters empty.

The current issue of The New York Review of Books has the second (of two) superb essays by economists Paul Krugman and Robin Wells on the long lingering recession. Nominally, Krugman and Wells are reviewing three recent books on the causes and consequences of the Great Recession: Richard Koo’s The Holy Grail of Macroeconomics; Raghuram […]

Michael Norton (of Harvard Business School) and Dan Ariely (of Duke) have released results (pdf) from a series of experiments they did in 2005 on the subject of wealth inequality. They asked individuals in a nationally representative online panel to (1) estimate the current US distribution of wealth and (2) “build a better America” by […]

Forbes has released its latest list of the 400 richest people in America. The Guardian has worked up a quick analysis, including this great graph showing just how much inequality there is even at the absolute pinnacle of the US wealth distribution: The richest person on the list (Bill Gates) has 54 times more wealth […]

Citigroup, citing the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA), has ordered economics blogger Doug Henwood to remove a February 2009 Citibank report from Henwood’s Left Business Observer site. Henwood complied because WordPress, who hosts his site, would not allow him to post anything new to his site until he deleted the document. Berkeley economist Brad DeLong […]

Local estimates suggest that about one of every five federal economic stimulus dollars was spent upgrading the road, sidewalks, and dog parks on 17th Street, NW, from Massachusetts to Florida Avenues. You can celebrate the cessation of combat operations with local residents and businesses, this Saturday from 2pm to 6pm. The organizers have produced a […]

Eric Fisher has produced an amazing series of maps of racial and ethnic concentration in 40 US cities. The series is based on a map that Bill Rankin originally made for Chicago in 2009. Here is Washington, DC (click through for a much better, interactive image):

A while back I posted some XHTML-validated code to embed Youtube videos. (The code that Youtube provides if you click on their “Embed” link will not validate.) Right after I posted the immediately preceding post, which includes an embedded Youtube video, I remembered this problem and, sure enough, the embedded video did not validate. My […]

A great three-minute video called “Yelp (With Apologies to Allen Ginsberg) narrated by Peter Coyote”. Here is the complete text of Ginsberg’s “Howl“; and here are recordings (mp3 format) of Ginsberg reading Part I, Part II, and Part III of the poem.