Economics

Medicaid Enrollment “Blips”

February 16, 2021 Economics

Updated Medicaid enrollment tracker (through last May) today and found some interesting and perhaps related “blips.” For about four years, there had been a slow decline in enrollment for all age groups under 65. In March of last year as COVID-19 slammed New York, that reversed, especially among those 21-44. Not surprising and consistent with […]

Read the full article →

What if Last Week’s Stock Market Tumble Wasn’t Due or Not Entirely to Coronavirus?

March 2, 2020 Disease

My friend Tom Fiddamon (@tomfid), a System Dynamicist of the first order, just published Stock markets and coronavirus – an endogenous perspective – MetaSD. His summary point is: Coronavirus may indeed be the proximate cause of this week’s decline, in the same sense as the straw that broke the camel’s back. However, the magnitude of he […]

Read the full article →

Book Review: “Weapons of Math Destruction. Read It!

April 14, 2017 Analysis

Cathy O’Neil’s Weapons of Math Destruction, How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy, is a terrific and important book.  O’Neil has the credentials and the cred. Her Ph.D. in mathematics is from Harvard and she subsequently taught at Barnard. She took her analytical skills to D. E. Shaw, a hedge fund and then to […]

Read the full article →

Gambling for Economic Development is High Risk

April 13, 2016 Cities

Gambling is intrinsically a zero-sum game. Though there may be locally, in the aggregate, there’s no economic multiplier. So it’s never made sense to me as a viable strategy for economic development. At best, it’s a break-even. And, the odds are that, it simply transfers money from one region to another, mostly from poor to […]

Read the full article →

The Rich Get Richer … Connecting the Economic, Political & Social Dots

September 29, 2015 Economics

Just a reminder. I first published this in 2006 under a my old SignalHealth label and again here in 2011. It seems to get more current every day. Certainly, there are a lot of tax “plans” being floated that confirm one of the self-reinforcing loops depicted (influencing changes in public policy to the advantage of […]

Read the full article →

Property Taxes in New York, Outside NYC

January 21, 2015 Economics

Andrew Cuomo, Governor of New York in his combined State of the State and Budget Address, January 21, 2015. “When people complain about high taxes in New York, they’re talking about the property tax.” OK, how much, for what and where? Mostly schools and secondarily counties. These data are for over 3,200 local governments outside […]

Read the full article →

Ghost of Tom Joad

November 12, 2014 Economics

Somehow the “The Ghost of Tom Joad” feels timely. Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band with Tom Morello at Madison Square Garden in NYC, October, 2009.

Read the full article →

What Would Coase and Williamson Say?

September 17, 2014 Economics

it will be interesting to see if they can pull this off. This from the New York Times: “Hospitals and Insurer Join Forces in California” In a partnership that appears to be the first of its kind, Anthem Blue Cross, a large California health insurance company, is teaming up with seven fiercely competitive hospital groups […]

Read the full article →

The Long – Post Sandy Disaster – Haul and Some Advice

November 3, 2012 Economics

Back in 2005, my wife and I suffered through a fire. We had just completed moving into a downtown Albany neighborhood, the new place was jammed with boxes, the furniture was randomly placed, and we were exhausted. So we took the weekend off to rest in New Hampshire. On our return, we discovered that our […]

Read the full article →

Life Amongst the 47 Percent

September 19, 2012 Economics

Mac McClelland, of Mother Jones, visits her father, a college friend, and others in Ohio’s War on the Middle Class, “Wherein I go home, watch public servants get axed, visit the warehouse of unbearable sorrow, hang with jobless thirty somethings living in abandoned homes, and consider whether my generation is flat-out screwed.” I’d forgotten that […]

Read the full article →

← Previous Entries