Dean Baker points out a pet peeve of mine: The tendency of reporters to frame economic facts in terms of absolute values versus proportions. Hearing that France’s Nicholas Sarkozy wants to cut taxes by $90 billion over the next ten years would probably leave you thinking Sarkozy wanted to cut taxes by a lot. Hearing […]
Ezra Klein
Ezra Klein is a former Prospect writer and current editor-in-chief at Vox. His work has appeared in the LA Times, The Guardian, The Washington Monthly, The New Republic, Slate, and The Columbia Journalism Review. He’s been a commentator on MSNBC, CNN, NPR, and more.
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The Wal-Mart Effect
There’s an interesting twist to this Business Week article on the chaos Wal-Mart sparked in the consumer electronics industry when they began dropping their prices on flat-screen TVs. “Circuit City shares have fallen 24%, to $18.76, since the end of November,” reports Business Week, “when the price war started. In the same period, Tweeter’s shares […]
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Ever More Entourage
Via LitBrit comes the only site worth reading: Let’s Blog It Out, a blog entirely devoted to Entourage. It even links to a which member of Entourage are you quiz, where we find out that I “deserve hot ladies, career success and an entourage of your own, just like Vinnie Chase.” Hear that, world? Update: […]
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Health Care Will Eat Us
Kash Monsori summarizes the pictures of Medicare and Social Security painted by the just-released Trustees’ Report: The SS program will only be able to cover about three-fourths of its expenses by the year 2041; the Medicare program will reach almost the same point in 2019. Fixing the SS shortfall would require a 16 percent increase […]
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ABORTIONS AND BREAST…
ABORTIONS AND BREAST CANCER. I almost feel silly writing this, but new data from a massive Harvard study shows there’s no link between abortion and breast cancer. There was, of course, never any good reason to assume there was a link, but the anti-abortion movement seized on a few obviously unsound studies with typical ferocity, […]
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In Search of Worse Books
Special Topics in Calamity Physics. Now that’s a well-done book. Sure the characters are disruptively unbelievable and the plot doesn’t really start until page 300 and the ending makes no sense at all, but those are virtues; they help the book hit my sweet spot: Entertaining, but not grabbing. I hate being grabbed by a […]
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The Great Society Revisited
It’s axiomatic among conservatives that Lyndon Johnson’s tenure was a historic failure, while Ronald Reagan’s was a remarkable success. But for whom? For all the talk of the Great Society’s failures, it’s striking how much poverty actually did decrease, and how many of the period’s programs remain in vibrant operation today. This graph, from a […]
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BIG MEDIA MATT….
BIG MEDIA MATT. And a big — what’s the word? — “woo!” to Matt Yglesias for turning MSM (“mainstream magazine”). Matt has been a powerful voice at The American Prospect over the past few years, and his contributions and presence will be dearly missed. More personally, Matt was my original inspiration for entering blogging, the […]
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“Harry Potter and the Mystery of Inequality”
Alex Tabbarok has a wonderfully titled post using J.K Rowling’s reported billion dollars to illuminate the economics of superstars. And it’s true, as he says, that “Homer…told great stories but could earn no more in a night than say 50 people might pay for an evening’s entertainment. Shakespeare did a little better…The Globe theater could […]