The only interesting part of my Feedburner stats that is interesting to me is the part that tells me how visitors landed on this page. Usually it’s through search, of course. I have two general reactions to the most frequent search terms: 1) I should write more about that; and2) Why the hell are so […]

The Economist had an article on disease causing genes in a recent issue. Common sense tells us that … the older a gene is, the more likely it is to be part of the irreducible structure of being alive… Another reason for expecting that disease-related genes would be recently evolved is that the older a […]

Everybody’s talking about deflation all of a sudden. I was a month and a half early, I guess. (Okay, okay, it was a footnote, but still.) What I said then was, we won’t allow deflation. And we have the means at hand to prevent it. Of course, monetizing the debt only goes so far when […]

“Reckless, booming anarchy,” in short, produced fundamental progress. It was not a stable system, racked as it was by bank failures and collapsed business ventures, outrageous speculation and defaulted loans. Yet it was also energetic and inventive, creating permanent economic growth that endured after the froth was blown away. This is Greider describing the 1830’s. […]

Surowiecki has an interesting take on the obvious up on his New Yorker blog. And I don’t mean that in a bad way: it seems economists could usefully spend much of their time reviewing the obvious and why it doesn’t fit our overly simplistic economic models. He notes the fact that when stock prices go […]

I was basically writing this exact same thing: economics as a science is a poor excuse for science (hat tip to Kedrosky… again.) Economics is fascinating, because no one knows anything. Greider, in his excellent Secrets of the Temple said, in 1987: The ultimate test for soundness for any science was the ability of its […]

Okay, last post for a while on the economy. Macroeconomics fascinates me, mainly because I think it’s about as well-developed as psychohistory, so Monday morning quarterbacking is possible as in no other discipline. But other commentators comment better; if you’re really interested, you’ve found them. This post is simply a long rant aimed at getting […]

I read today that the market is at its lowest level since 2003. As a percentage of GDP (which calculation has the benefits of automatically adjusting for inflation and actual economic growth) it’s at its lowest level since 1995. I’ve updated the graph to show today’s change as well as focus in on 1982 to […]

I thought this was going to be more comforting than it turned out to be. Although, I have to say that it’s a lot more comforting now that I’ve added today’s market close. GDP and Total Stock Market Capitalization in Real Billions of Dollars This is a lot less comforting. Total Stock Market Capitalization as […]

“The US average growth rate of real per capita incomes over the last 190 years has been 1.8% a year, and the same rate over the last 10 years has been…. 1.8% a year.“ (Hat tip to Chris Blattman.)