Newmark's Door

Sounds like a good target for reform:

Fifty years since NEPA was signed into law, the process has become a bureaucratic nightmare. The latest data show that completing an EIS takes four and a half years, on average. One-quarter of the statements take upward of six years. Some projects drag on even longer: the approval process for a 12-mile expansion of Interstate 70 in Denver took 13 years to complete, with a final impact statement running 8,951 pages (not including an additional 7,307 pages of appendices).

6.5 minute video making the secondary point that as a society we are really, really rich. I used the anecdote about Nathan Rothschild in one  of my classes. I think it is dramatic as hell.

(But I object to the interpretation of the Pew poll. The video assumes the question pertains just to economic well being. It could well have been interpreted by respondents much more broadly to include such things as the current awful cultural conflict.)

Unsurprising: macroeconomics is difficult.

Not that it was difficult to do.

Baptists and bootleggers explains a heck of a lot.

Piece has some fun with a serious issue.

On the one hand, I'd cut Ms. Psaki some slack: she has a truly terrible job. On the other hand, not so much: I imagine she could almost surely get another job in consulting, PR, or elsewhere in government, so she could quit any time.

If given the chance the market is good at repurposing assets.

By David Henderson and Steven Globerman. For FREE. Highly recommended.

(Full disclosure: I'm a UCLA Ph.D. in Economics, 1984.)

A big mistake. Huge.

The Biden Administration wants to transform antitrust law. In doing so, it would dispense with a four-decade-old consensus that the welfare of consumers should be the object of competition policy. This principle would be replaced with a mixture of untested economic ideas combined with a view that antitrust law should somehow advance democracy. If the latter standard seems unclear, its very lack of clarity may be an implicit goal. 

I don't know--as I've written before, macroeconomics is difficult--but I think this ends badly.

Of course, Modern Monetary Theory is not modern at all. It has been tried by desperate governments for several centuries, and arguably back to ancient times. Just ask residents of the Weimar Republic, Argentina, Zimbabwe and Venezuela, to name only a few of the most famous instances, how Modern Monetary Theory worked out for them.