Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

I'm thinking today about the HGTV program, "Love it or list it." In each episode, a designer (Hilary) and a real estate expert (David) offer competing solutions to the move-or-stay issue of a couple with gripes about their abode. The couple (and sometimes children) is presumably out, and staying at a hotel while Hilary and her team gut their house and re-work it to spec so the owners will 'love it' again and want to stay. If they don't want to stay after all ... well, at the worst Hilary's work will have improved its value, so they can list the property, get more money from it than they otherwise would have, and buy the nice new home that David has found for them. I find the economics of Hilary's work intriguing. David's search for a new dream home is a distraction at best. Near the end of each show, the hosts present four numbers. The fascinating one, the one NOT on the list, is what I think of as "value added," and one gets it ...

On Tuesday, October 10 (yes, I know, that's a while back -- this is a philosophy blog, not your daily news, bro) The Secretary General of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries asked for help from US based shale producers. The SG in question is Mohammed Barkindo, and he is about 1 year into a 3 year term in that post. He's a western educated fellow , with a degree from Southwestern University in Washington DC who did PhD work at Oxford.  On petroleum economics, natch. I'd love to see a copy of his doctoral dissertation. It may be available on line, but I'm too indolent to go searching for it right now. But: what about shale producers? These are the infamous "frackers," folks.Here's what Reuters has to say:  http://www.reuters.com/article/us-india-energy/opec-secretary-general-urges-u-s-shale-oil-producers-to-help-cap-global-supply-idUSKBN1CF0C4 He wants the frackers to cut back production because OPEC is doing so, and all producers of...

A federal appeals court recently ruled that a patent on a successful birth control product is invalid  because the patent owner made an offer to sell the invention more than one year before it applied for said patent.  This sounds like a straightforward application of what patent lawyers call the "on sale bar." MERCK & Cie v. WATSON LABS, 125 F.Supp 3d 503 (D. Del. 2015). Merck is appealing this to the SCOTUS. It sought a "stay of mandate," that is, it tried to get Chief Justice Roberts to rule that the decision would not take effect until the high court heard and decided the matter. But they failed to get the stay, so Watson, the generic drug manufacturer, gets to sell the drug at issue in the US pending further developments. Here's a relevant brief from Watson's lawyers. On July 27, Roberts denied that application for stay in a brief order, providing no rationale. Merck's argument is that what it did more than one year prior to the applic...

Okay, I think I have a fix on this. Suppose we want to test our hypothesis that otherwise comparable firms with high levels of indebtedness cut back on expenditures desired by employees in circumstances where their not-so-indebted cousins would not. (For a further explanation of that hypothesis, review Part I of this discussion from last week.) How do we do it? We'll assume that we haven't found a smoking gun memo in which the company's Treasurer writes to the CEO and says, "we can't afford those darn safety vests any longer. Tell Human Resources to stop buying them so we can make the interest payments!" Assume we're looking at circumstantial evidence. What counts as evidence? What we can't do is simply say: firm X buys safety vests for its employees and is mostly equity financed. Firm Y doesn't and isn't. No matter how many Xs and Ys we find compliant with our hypothesis, we will still have only correlation, not causation. The arrow of...

Every once in awhile we hear econo pundits telling us how evil deflation would be. Why? Well ... deflation is often a symptom of bad times. If a lot of people are out of work and have no purchasing power, demand for a wide range of products will drop and so will the general level of prices, i.e. there will be deflation. This is one way of getting to deflation, and the causes of that symptom are, to those directly affected, bad things indeed. BUT ... deflation there is only a symptom, not a cause of the trouble, and this doesn't rule out the possibility that deflation in other contexts may be harmless, or better-than-harmless. One often encounters a suspicion of deflation that goes beyond any real justification, and this is the background of an expectation that a central bank should program into an economy a mild level of price inflation, say 2 to 3%. Just to keep those deflationary demons away? These thoughts are motivated by Apple's product launching event on March 2...