Category: Kevin Drum

Looking for news you can trust?Subscribe to our free newsletters. How much has the opioid epidemic been a response to poor economic conditions? Eric Levitz points us today to a new paper from Christopher Ruhm of the University of Virginia. He examined changes in economic conditions at the county level to see how much this…

Looking for news you can trust?Subscribe to our free newsletters. Yesterday I linked to a Wall Street Journal article which reported that the World Bank had gamed its “Doing Business” rankings to make Chile look worse during the years it was governed by a socialist president. Paul Romer, the chief economist of the Bank, promised…

Looking for news you can trust?Subscribe to our free newsletters. For all you bitcoin skeptics out there, here’s a lovely chart from Jeremy Grantham that compares bitcoin to other famous bubbles in history: In other bitcoin news, I’ve wondered aloud several times about how many bitcoin trades involve real money vs. other cryptocurrencies (tether, ethereum,…

Looking for news you can trust?Subscribe to our free newsletters. Whenever I see an op-ed insisting that California is a total, um, shithole of a state, I always check the credit line at the bottom. Four times out of five it comes from City Journal, often by professional California scold Kerry Jackson. Sure enough, that’s…

Alex Edelman/CNP via ZUMA Looking for news you can trust?Subscribe to our free newsletters. In his recent interview with the Wall Street Journal, President Trump said “I probably have a very good relationship with Kim Jong Un of North Korea.” It was certainly a peculiar thing to say. Today, instead of explaining it, the ever…

TriStar Productions/Entertainment Pictures via ZUMA Looking for news you can trust?Subscribe to our free newsletters. Chris Barton of the LA Times reports that Mark Wahlberg and his agent will donate $2 million to Time’s Up in an effort to make amends for the huge fee Wahlberg got for reshoots of All the Money in the…