From Krugman’s blog: One of the big but little-noticed economic stories of the past few years is the sharp slowdown in US productivity growth. Dean Baker and John Schmitt are on the case; their recent article is definitely worth reading. Baker and Schmidt argue that the era in which US productivity was surging ahead of [...]
The text of John Edward’s Hanover speech reprinted in full (via Crooked Timber): Remarks as Prepared for Delivery: “To Build One America, End the Game” Hanover, New Hampshire August 23, 2007 This election is unlike any we have faced before. The stakes are higher. And the challenges we face as a nation are greater than [...]
Almost every night the news features at least one story about rising commodity prices. A few extra cents for spinach or milk might not seem earth shattering, but I know how hard my students scrimp and save to get buy. At the school lunch buffet I load up my tray with a bit of everything [...]
Via Strange Maps, a chart/map showing US States renamed with the names of countries where the GDP is similar to that of those states. {maps, GDP}
A few weeks ago Victor Mair wrote a guest post on Language Log implying that China’s high rates of illiteracy could be cured by reforming the script, replacing difficult to learn characters with phonetic spelling. There is lots of good discussion of this topic on Language Hat, and there was a good post on the [...]
The following quotes and chart were culled from Jason DeParle’s New York Review of Books article, “The American Prison Nightmare.” The issue has been covered here extensively. Here is a Google search of the Keywords archives for the word “prison.” Black men in their early thirties are imprisoned at seven times the rate of whites [...]
Wikipedia lists some problems with the current method of calculating the unemployment rate in the US. These include the fact that 1.5% of the available working population is incarcerated, the large number of people who have dropped out of the work force, “involuntary part-time workers” who would like full-time work, etc. It is also worth [...]
I haven’t been doing much John Edwards blogging since he announced his candidacy, but back in February I had bookmarked two articles about Edwards’ health care plan which I thought worth sharing. First, Paul Krugman lauds the use of “‘Health Markets’: government-run bodies negotiating with insurance companies on the public’s behalf”: Why is this such [...]
Steve Benen, who is guest blogging over at Political Animal, quotes John Edwards answering a question as to whether he would give balancing the deficit high priority: I think that, if we’re honest, you cannot it, it’s just common sense in the math, have universal health care, and invest in energy, and make a serious [...]
I’ve been delinquent in writing up the half a dozen stories on global inequality which I’ve been meaning to blog about, so here they all are in one go: “the richest 2% of adults in the world own more than half of global household wealth.” That’s looking at wealth, rather than income, but Michael Turton [...]