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Thursday, August 18, 2022

The rise and fall of empires

 Another case of #MarketsInEverything

Fraudulent markets in everything




Highlighting one of the best pieces of journalism this year

Among the story's revelations: a key former Trump official who said she regretted signing the family separation policy into existence


Opinion Why does the IRS need $80 billion? Just look at its cafeteria.




The rise and fall of empires

The last two centuries witnessed the rise and fall of empires. We construct a model which rationalises this in terms of the changing trade gains from empires. In the model, empires are arrangements that reduce trade cost between an industrial metropole and the agricultural periphery. During early industrialisation, the value of such bilateral trade increases, and so does the value of empires. As industrialisation diffuses, and as manufactures become more differentiated, trade becomes more multilateral and intra-industry, reducing the value of empires. Our results are consistent with long-term changes in income distribution and trade patterns, and with previous historical arguments.

That is from a new NBER working paper by Roberto Bonfatti and Kerem Coşar.


Secret swearing in of Scott Morrison to 3 portfolios ‘very peculiar’ ABC Australia. Which Dark Scotty could not have done without a sign-off from the Governor General



Major and minor writers alike are snoops, undercover busybodies, spies in the lives of others, voyeurs not exhibitionists, devoted to the trivial and private. Systematically examining the contents of a woman’s purse – a woman you have just met – seems as intimate as sex. Even minor writers, not just major ones like Babel, know the little things in life are important. Babel, like Nabokov and other Russian writers, is a master of detail. Canetti goes on:

 

“He took literature so seriously that he must have hated anything vague and approximate. However, my timidity was no weaker than his; I couldn’t get myself to say anything to him about Red Cavalryor The Odessa Stories.”

Elias Canetti: 'He Was Obsessed with Literature'


 Can chess and alcohol really be substitutes?



Bloomberg via Wealth Management: Americans have been warned for years of an impending retirement crisis. Yet the situation is getting worse. 
Even when everything was going right — inflation was nonexistent, interest rates were low and stocks were in an extended bull market — there was a multi-trillion dollar savings shortfall. 
Then came a pandemic, war in Europe, decades-high inflation, the fastest rate-hiking cycle since the early 1980s and fears of a recession. The resulting market turmoil erased some $3.4 trillion from 401(k)s and IRAs in the first half of 2022, according to Alicia Munnell, director of Boston College’s Center for Retirement Research. And that’s just for the people who have retirement accounts. 
About half of private-sector workers don’t have an employer-sponsored retirement plan, and many of those who do end up saving very little. It’s a problem that isn’t easily fixed, and contributes to the sense that the American Dream is in decline. 
And while surging inflation and volatile markets are bad news for people in or nearing retirement, the picture may be even worse for young Americans who are priced out of the housing market, struggling to build wealth and buried under mountains of student-loan debt…”