Alan

The Composition of the FOMC
www.calculatedriskblog.com/2025/08/the-...

IMPORTANT: It is critical that the Fed stay independent, data driven, and immune to political pressure.

This is also true for the Federal statistical agencies …

The Trump administration’s “cubic model” of coronavirus deaths, explained An extremely foolish way to forecast the pandemic.

Hassett has been a propagandist and not a truth teller for as long as I can remember.

www.vox.com/2020/5/8/212...

Larry Summers: "This is way beyond anything Nixon ever did ... this is the stuff of democracies giving way to authoritarianism. Firing statisticians goes with threatening the heads of newspapers, launching assaults on universities, launching assaults on law firms. This is really scary stuff."

How does the risk of death change as we age – and how has this changed over time? Death rates decline rapidly after birth but rise again in adolescence. From adulthood onwards, they rise exponentially.

Learn more, including about how the risk of death has changed in the last 200 years, in our article by @scientificdiscovery.dev: ourworldindata.org/how-do-the-r...

Age-specific mortality in the US, broken down by diseases and external causes, using data from the CDC Wonder between 2018 and 2021.

How does the risk of death change as we age?

#EconSky

The current administration is trying to fix that. ;-)

Retirees Face an $18,100 Benefit Cut in 7 Years | Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget 2025-07-24-The Social Security and Medicare trust funds are only a little more than seven years from insolvency, based on

This is approximately 0 years in time left to act.
www.crfb.org/blogs/retire...

YouTube video by The Tom Lehrer Wisdom Channel Tom Lehrer - We Will All Go Together When We Go

www.youtube.com/watch?v=frAE...

YouTube video by The Tom Lehrer Wisdom Channel Tom Lehrer - Who's Next - with intro

www.youtube.com/watch?v=oRLO...

Nobody is actually surprised.

💯

YouTube video by American Museum of Natural History Human Population Through Time #datavisualization

Great population visualization: #EconSky
www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUwm...

YouTube video by Inside China Business Another casualty of the trade wars: now we don't have transformers

#EconSky

Tariffs create problems.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xj2V...

Hard to understand. Official installer + pip-installed packages is pretty bulletproof, especially if you use virtual environments.

I suppose you could try uv.

#EconSky

#EconSky

Just published in @jpube.bsky.social:

"Does the prospect of upward mobility undermine support for redistribution?"

By @donandrewmoore.bsky.social‬, @renechoudhari.bsky.social, & @aileenwu.bsky.social
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

#econsky #publiceconomics

A bit ironic that the article is paywalled ...
I'll attach the abstract for whoever comes next.
I'd claim that such critiques need to pay much more attention to economics since the 1980s, particularly behavioral economics and the empirical turn.

1. Aristotle distinguished chrematistics from economics.

2. AI is also too important to be controlled by governments, so we have a real dilemma. What would feasible and helpful regulation look like?

In a stunning moment of self-delusion, the Wall Street Journal headline writers admitted that they don't know how LLM chatbots work.

Please explain the emergence of a middle class in the wake of the industrial revolutions -- a middle class that enjoys riches that were unimaginable to the kings of yore.

Climate change has increased the odds of extreme regional forest fire years globally - Nature Communications The authors show that extreme fire years in global forests align with rare fire weather extremes. Climate change has made such extremes 88-152% more probable. These findings highlight the need for act...

A new study shows that extreme fire years in global forests are 88-152% more likely now than they were in pre-industrial times, driven by climate change.

...necessitating proactive measures to mitigate risks and adapt to extreme fire years.

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Of course the only "real answer" on housing affordability is to build a lot more housing.

Apparently the well-coordinated pushback against The Age's Red Alert series continues unabated.

#EconSky

Collecting enough in taxes can of course eliminate the deficit.
#EconSky

YouTube video by Adult Swim Keep Summer Safe | Rick and Morty | Adult Swim

It still won't be conscious, of course, but it may nevertheless "try" to turn us into paper clips.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=4tpY...

What are AI agents? Definition, examples, and types AI agents are software systems that use AI to pursue goals and complete tasks on behalf of users. Learn more with Google Cloud.

cloud.google.com/discover/wha...

4.6 Billion Years On, the Sun Is Having a Moment In the past two years, without much notice, solar power has begun to truly transform the world’s energy system.

Globally, roughly a third more power is being generated from the sun this spring than last. If this exponential rate of growth can continue, we will soon live in a very different world, @billmckibben.bsky.social writes.