Society

I am reminded of the 2002 Spielberg movie “Minority Report” when I think of the digital age, terrorism and privacy concerns.  The movie is interesting not just for its Big Brother overtones, but also because of its prescience on…

For those of you who want specifics. Kleptocracy as defined in Wikipedia: Kleptocracy, alternatively cleptocracy or kleptarchy, from Greek kleptes (thieve) and kratos (rule), is a term applied to a government that takes advantage of…

Marshall Auerback here with a commentary on Robert Rubin’s recent Newsweek article on getting the economy back on track. As we all know, during his tenure as Treasury Secretary, Robert Rubin laid the groundwork for today's crisis through…

Byron Wien was amazingly accurate last year in his economic predictions even though his annual list is an attempt to build a non-consensus list of likely outlier events. So, I was eager to see Byron Wien's 2010 surprises, which were…

I will have some commentary on this in a future post or an updated version of this one. Update 1600 ET: you can see my commentary in the next post here. The Surprises of 2010 The United States economy grows at a stronger than expected…

Hat tip FiveThirtyEight. once you remove the U.S., there's a strong correlation between spending and life expectancy, and this is super-clear from the scatterplot. For more information behind this chart, click the link below.…

I must be incredibly sleep-deprived because my last post overlooked a critical case in the financial blogosphere where the same issues of blogging and government coercion are at issue. I completely forgot that the Implode-o-Meter sites are…

Michael Arrington, a prolific blogger in the Tech community, has written a thoughtful piece on bloggers’ right/duty to protect confidential sources in the face of government pressure to do otherwise.  I’d like to post a portion of that…

Back in September I posted “Now watch this drive” to explain voters’ increasing alarm at Obama’s detachment from the economic problems of ordinary Americans.  Commenting on a video featuring a famous George W. Bush gaffe, I said:…

Yesterday, I indicated I would write a few thematic posts as a look back at some of the more important economic topics that this credit crisis has uncovered. Tying posts together in a theme definitely gives a better holistic view of a the…