EconTech

Sweden: Image and Reality
Sweden is often viewed as either social democratic paradise or lefty hell, depending on one’s political and economic orientation.
Parts of the popular image are true. Sweden has a strong political left; the Social Democratic party was in power continuously for more than four decades in the middle of the 20th century and [...]

VoxEU summarizes a series of analysis by Gelman that I have previously covered. Considering the quality of VoxEU summaries, I thought it worth posting.
P.S. Sorry for the outage the other evening, the power that my server is on seems to be quite unstable. After a power hiccup, a newly bad memory stick was causing networking [...]

I rather like the graph, except for the fact that it doesn’t fit on my monitor in one view.
Bartels bash

We’re having a panel discussion this afternoon about Larry Bartels’s new book, Unequal Democracy. One of Larry’s really striking results is his finding that inequality systematically increases under Republican but not Democratic presidents. I’ve written that [...]

Well, Alex says a lot of what I said. Bartels isn’t so surprising given the previously existing PBC literature, even in other countries. However, the literature does have a number of mechanisms, more than just sticky prices if I remember correctly; if you are interested in scoping it out, read the previous posts for the [...]

Rodrik gives Bartels space to guest blog, and he produces an excellent Q&A formatted response to the questions and criticisms many had of the result we showed last week. Tyler has a few comments up on Bartels’ response:
Larry Bartels responds

Professor Rodrik has kindly invited me to respond to some of the questions and comments generated [...]

Well, I thought that since PK said he doesn’t buy the Bartels graphs because he doesn’t have a sound reason to believe they are true I would mention that. I am posting though, because people are looking very confused at them (comments and trackbacks). I cannot speak to Bartels’ book, but there is already a [...]

“Bush’s Market-Liberal Scam”

This is from the Ludwig von Mises Institute. They are pleased Bush wasn’t able to get his Social Security plan implemented because it would have undermined free market capitalism:
Bush’s Market-Liberal Scam, by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.: President Bush began his second term with a big push for “Social Security [...]