I have been writing once a week for forty years, and if I weren’t writing a book about some of the changes in economics that have occurred over that time, I’d keep writing it.  Instead, I’ll wrap up the weekly in order to finish the book.

The first twenty years were easy. With a thoroughly heterodox book – The Idea of Economic Complexity — behind me, I began writing EP in 1993, as a column in the Sunday Boston Globe. There was a newsroom of 500 or so talented reporters and  editors, generous travel, and access to economists and fringe players of all sorts,  I covered Boston economics from Chicago, the San Francisco Bay area, and Washington, D.C.  A  collection of columns followed in 1992:  Economic Principals: Masters and Mavericks of Modern Economics. The year after that, The New York Times bought the Globe, and took control in 2001, with new plans for the paper. I moved online in 2002.

The second twenty years were more difficult. There was no boisterous newsroom in which to exchange information. I depended on economists to fill me in. On a fellowship in Berlin, I finished Knowledge and the Wealth Nations: A Story of Economic Discovery.  about Paul Romer and the obstacles he faced with his contribution to growth theory.  Romer shared a Nobel Prize with William Nordhaus in 2018.

I expected to write  a sequel, but certain aspects of the 2008 crisis seemed a better story. I switched topics in 2010, but in 2016, my editor, whom I revered, told me that “nobody wants another book about the crisis.” He was right. I changed topics a third time and began the book I am finishing now.

Between times, I self-published, clumsily, a little book about privatization in Russia: Because They Could: The Harvard Russia Scandal (and NATO Enlargement) after Twenty-Five Years. Despite the lack of a title page,, it proved to be prescient, in more ways than one; Janet Yellen was appointed Chair of the Federal Reserve Board, instead of Lawrence Summers.

Somewhere around 2005,  I adopted a public broadcasting model, in which a relative few subscribers pay for a relative many to read. I also added a new word to EP’s masthead, “politics”,  as in A weekly newsletter about economics and politics, formerly a column of the Boston Globe, independent since 2002. EP had become a weekly now, no longer a newspaper column.

It had become more difficult to write about economics week after week. Sources preferred to talk to a newspaper. I read five daily  papers, The Economist,  Science, and Foreign Affairs. I had strong opinions, and I was good at finding unusual angles.

And so it has been.  After moving to Substack in 2022, I added some detail to the circumstances surrounding John Kerry’s 1996 re-election to the US Senate in 1996, and the 2004 Swift Boat Veterans brouhaha, but otherwise, things didn’t change much.

I give up the weekly edition of EP with mixed emotions. It was that or risk missing my deadline for an interesting book.  I had several projects in the works for the weekly.  I’ll carry them out in  the new monthly edition, in greater depth. Stay with it and you’ll always know when it is the first of the month, starting in June.

With profound gratitude, I thank the Globe editors who put EP in business, Lincoln Millstein, Matthew Storin, and Michael Janeway; its copy editors over the years, Mark Feeney and Richard Pitkin;  and, especially, the subscribers who it going all these years.

Although top-flight economics today is practiced all over the world, especially in the United Kingdom, its ancestral home, Boston remains capital of the profession, with Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard University, and the National Bureau of Economic Research.  It has been a privilege to write Economics Principals, and to look forward to more to come.

The post Phase Change appeared first on Economic Principals.

Scratch his back and he’ll scratch theirs

The Washington Post reports:

As Donald Trump sat with some of the country’s top oil executives at his Mar-a-Lago Club last month, one executive complained about how they continued to face burdensome environmental regulations despite spending $400 million to lobby the Biden administration in the last year.

Trump’s response stunned several of the executives in the room overlooking the ocean: You all are wealthy enough, he said, that you should raise $1 billion to return me to the White House. At the dinner, he vowed to immediately reverse dozens of President Biden’s environmental rules and policies and stop new ones from being enacted, according to people with knowledge of the meeting, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe a private conversation.

Giving $1 billion would be a “deal,” Trump said, because of the taxation and regulation they would avoid thanks to him, according to the people

He doesn’t need to hide it because he knows that nothing will ever happen to him. He has “immunity” from accountability for everything in life and always has.

The United States is producing and selling more oil right now, under Joe Biden, than any other country has in history. But that’s not good enough. We have to do everything possible to ensure that climate change is as cataclysmic as possible and Trump’s the guy who promises to do that.

The contrast between the two candidates on climate policy could not be more stark. Biden has called global warming an “existential threat,” and over the last three years, his administration has finalized 100 new environmental regulations aimed at cutting air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions, restricting toxic chemicals, and conserving public lands and waters. In comparison, Trump has called climate change a “hoax,” and his administration weakened or wiped out more than 125 environmental rules and policies over four years.

Not a dime’s worth of difference? How about this?

The U.S. oil industry is drawing up ready-to-sign executive orders for Donald Trump aimed at pushing natural gas exports, cutting drilling costs and increasing offshore oil leases in case he wins a second term, according to energy executives with direct knowledge of the work.

The effort stems from the industry’s skepticism that the Trump campaign will be able to focus on energy issues as Election Day draws closer — and worries that the former president is too distracted to prepare a quick reversal of the Biden administration’s green policies. Oil executives also worry that a second Trump administration won’t attract staff skillful enough to roll back President Joe Biden’s regulations or craft new ones favoring the industry, these people added.

If you want to know why the Big Money Boyz and the Bill Barrs of the Republican party still support him. Sure, he’ll destroy our democracy, but their agenda will be fulfilled. Trump’s phony populism is nothing more than a way to get the rubes to vote for them and they know it.

By the way, here’s one little irrelevant detail that stood out to me.

Yet oil giants will see an even greater windfall — helped by new offshore drilling, speedier permits and other relaxed regulations— in a second Trump administration, the former president told the executives over the dinner of chopped steak at Mar-a-Lago.

He served chopped steak? To wealthy oil men from whom he was asking a billion dollars?

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The FRED Blog often uses data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS): A few years ago, we used their Consumer Expenditures Survey to discuss the preferences for life insurance and other personal insurance services among different population groups. Today, we use data from the Producer Price Index program of the BLS to discuss the premiums charged for some of those services.

The two solid lines in the FRED graph above show the year-over-year percent growth rate in the premiums charged for insuring two types of assets: private automobiles (red line) and homes (green line). The dashed black line is the annual growth rate in the headline property and casualty producer price index, which includes, among others, commercial, medical, and worker’s compensation insurance.

Since 1999, when data are first available, cycles in the growth rate of insurance premiums are easily visible. For example, two distinct periods of fast growth in automobile insurance premiums in the early 2000s and mid-to-late 2010s were followed by periods of much slower growth and even decreases in premium values. So, what can help explain those cyclical fluctuations in value?

The 2023 annual report on the insurance industry by the Federal Insurance Office names several factors impacting the overall financial standing of insurers. Most recently, widespread natural disasters have resulted in large payouts and higher interest rates have decreased the value of fixed-income securities held in this sector’s investment portfolios. To compensate for those losses, insurers have raised their premiums at a pace not recorded in many years.

How this graph was created: Search FRED for and select “Producer Price Index by Industry: Premiums for Property and Casualty Insurance.” From the “Edit Graph” panel, use the “Add Line” tab to search for and select “Producer Price Index by Industry: Premiums for Property and Casualty Insurance: Premiums for Private Passenger Auto Insurance.” Click on “Add data series” and repeat the previous step to add “Producer Price Index by Industry: Premiums for Property and Casualty Insurance: Premiums for Homeowner’s Insurance” to the graph. Next, select the “Edit Lines” tab and use the “Units” dropdown menu to select “Percent Change from Year Ago.” Lastly, use the “Format” tab to customize the line styles.

Suggested by Diego Mendez-Carbajo.

We’re going to be at CHI! The Community Date Science Collective will be presenting work from group members and affiliates. CHI is taking place in Honolulu, Hawaiʻi from May 11th – 16th.

By Robert Linsdell from St. Andrews, Canada – Flight from Honolulu to Hilo. Over Sand Island and Honolulu (503729), CC BY 2.0

Jeremy Foote (Purdue University) coauthored “How Founder Motivations, Goals, and Actions Influence Early Trajectories of Online Communities” with Sanjay R Kairam. This work will be presented at “Online Communities: Engagement A” on Tuesday, May 14th at 9:45 a.m. You can also read about Jeremy and Sanjay’s work on our blog.

Carolyn Zou (Northwestern University) will be presenting with coauthor Helena Vasconcelos on their work “Validation Without Ground Truth? Methods for Trusts in Generative Simulations” at the CHI workshops HEAL (Human-Centered Evaluation and Auditing of Language Models) and TREW (Trust and Reliance in Evolving Human-AI Workflows). They will be presenting posters at both sessions and have been selected as a highlighted paper for HEAL and will be giving a presentation on Sunday, May 12th.

Ruijia Cheng (University of Washington) will be their presenting their research on “AXNav: Replaying Accessibility Tests from Natural Language” with cowriters Maryam Taeb, Eldon Schoop, Yue Jiang, Amanda Swearngin, and Jeffrey Nichols. This presentation will be taking place at “Universal Accessibility” on Tuesday, May 14th at 4:30 p.m.

CDSC affiliate Nicholas Vincent is receiving the Outstanding Dissertation Award for their research on “Economic Concentration and Dispossessive Data Use: Can HCI Solve Challenges from and to AI?“. Nicholas will also be presenting their papers “Pika: Empowering Non-Programmers to Author Executable Governance Policies in Online Communities” with Leijie Wang, Julija Rukanskaitė, and Amy X. Zhang at “Supporting Communities” on Thursday, May 16th at 11:00 a.m. and “A Canary in the AI Coal Mine: American Jews May Be Disproportionately Harmed by Intellectual Property Dispossession in Large Language Model Training” with Heila Precel, Brent Hecht, and Allison McDonald at “Politics of Data” on Wednesday, May 15th at 2:45 p.m.

Mandi Cai (Northwestern University) received an honorable mention award alongside coauthor Matthew Kay for their paper “Watching the Election Sausage Get Made: How Data Journalists Visualize the Vote Counting Process in U.S. Elections“. Mandi will be presenting this research at “Governance and Public Policies” on Wednesday, May 15th at 12:00 p.m.