Dr. Fauci is attracting a lot of attention for his weekend remarks that attacks on him are attacks on science, because “They’re really criticizing science, because I represent science.” Some of the criticisms are that he is revealing himself as the partisan he always was, some are that he has grown enamored with his own […]

As I related in the last blog post in this series, its seems likely we’re going to have inflation rates greater than the Fed’s goal in the near term (say the next couple of years)–if we don’t have some sort of economic collapse. I say the latter because when you have systematic debasement of the […]

In a period of shortages and inflation, I have been thinking a lot about deflation (maybe I have been dreaming about it). As I watch prices increase, it occurred to me that we only every discuss getting inflation back under control, but we never discuss prices falling back to a certain level. Why are we […]

This morning I jotted the following note to James Mackintosh, who authored a weekend article on MMT and my former professor, L. Randall Wray. Mr. Mackintosh Thanks for the article on MMT; as a former student of Randy Wray during the 1990s, I appreciate seeing the consistency of his thought, even though I still see […]

Partisan polarization feels like a fact of life. Media outlets and social media algorithms alike gravitate toward the extremes, so much of what we hear and see confirm this perception. Our political leaders, on both sides of the aisle, appeal to the most radical parts of their base to avoid primary challengers. Common ground is […]

After months of denying that inflation was a problem (just transitory you see), Joe Biden appears to be finally getting the memo (maybe he’s even reading BATG!?). It was amazing on Sunday seeing some of the Democratic talking head analysts act as if Mr. Biden could just pivot on his message and he could get […]

I have never really understood my fellow Americans who vote for or against a politician based on their personality. I mean, at some level, you want to vote for someone you’d like to have as your next door neighbor–you don’t have to think too hard to understand why Kamala Harris’s poll numbers are deep underwater. […]

In part 1 of this series, we looked at a basic macro model of the forces of how supply and demand interact, which can lead to increased price levels. In part 2, we looked at how changes in the money supply can affect the price level. In this blog post, we’re going to think more […]

I was going to post part 3 of my inflation series, but since no one will read it in the aftermath of the big vote last night, I’ll delay that till tomorrow and instead offer a couple of thoughts on the election. First, the VA results alone are very encouraging, but remember Mr. McAuliffe was […]

Dune is the most immersive and ambitious science fiction film since Blade Runner. Dune is long (2 hours and 35 minutes) and demanding, dropping the viewer into an information desert, crawling to find a voice-over oasis or searching the scorched horizon for an explanatory character to reveal the backstory. Wisely, Denis Villeneuve (who directed and […]