Polio's Moving Target

Ewen Callaway Nature
Finding and vaccinating Nigerian nomads may be one of the last obstacles to the eradication of polio. Remote settlements in northern Nigeria remain a challenge for vaccine workers.

Taking the "Con" Out of Economics

A recent “Spreadsheet Scandal” has rocked the economics world. It has eliminated the last remaining technical argument in support of the President’s “chained CPI” Social Security cut. Earlier this year the IMF admitted they had made errors in their modelling of expenditure multipliers. Now, the darlings of the austerity cultists – Rogoff and Reinhart – has been exposed for errors in spreadsheet coding. Who is ever going to take responsibility for these travesties?

Before Housing Bubbles, There Was Land Fever

Robert J. Shiller The New York Times
Since 1997, we have lived through the biggest real estate bubble in United States history — followed by the most calamitous decline in housing prices that the country has ever seen. Fundamental factors like inflation and construction costs affect home prices, of course. But the radical shifts in housing prices in recent years were caused mainly by investor-induced speculation. Previous events were fundamentally different from the recent housing bubble.

The Organizing Model: As American as Apple Pie

Erik Forman In These Times
Unions have looked to the US for ideas about how to fight back. They adopted "The Organizing Model," an approach to organizing first developed by the AFL-CIO in the 1980s that is now a core principle in virtually every major labor organization in the US, Europe, Australia, and parts of Asia. While the shift to an "organizing" orientation is more than necessary, it is also less than sufficient to revive the labor movement and it's shortcomings have also become apparent.

Pete Peterson Linked Economists Caught in Austerity Error

By Mary Bottari PR Watch
A team of economists at the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) at UMass Amherst broke a huge story this week that was promptly picked up by the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Financial Times, and newspapers around the globe. The economists proved that the essential underpinning "of the intellectual edifice of austerity economics," as Paul Krugman put it, is based on sloppy methodology and spreadsheet coding errors.