Top all-time · #7457
Mike Konczal
Personal blog · rortybomb.wordpress.comeconomicspolitics
Mike Konczal writes Rortybomb, a personal blog at rortybomb.wordpress.com about economics and politics. Since 2009, 11 different Hacker News readers have linked it 21 times, most often “Persistence of Poverty, and Increasing Marginal Utility”. The last post was in 2012, but the archive is still widely read.
Too few sampled comments (8) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Mike Konczal's blog for economic analysis of finance and policy, including credit card rates, GE's financial engineering, the Fed and inequality. Commenters also cite it as support for their own points.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 8 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
My name is Mike Konczal, and I'm a fellow with the Roosevelt Institute, where I work on financial reform, inequality, and a progressive vision of the economy. I'm also a columnist at Vox, a contributor to The Nation and a contributing editor at Dissent, and have written for a wide variety of publica
Most-linked posts?
- Persistence of Poverty, and Increasing Marginal Utility3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2009-12-05
What Hacker News says?
Mike Konczal has posted an interesting chart suggesting a link between economic freedom and prison: http://rortybomb.wordpress.com/2010/12/23/the-conservative-w...
Comment linking /2010/12/23/the-conservative-world-view-and-prison-populations-war-on-drugs/
on “Google Engineer bails out student in jail”Submitted What can the movie Bridesmaids tell us about the Recession? as a story · 3 points
HN discussionDo you honestly think that a few poor people in the US caused a Global Financial Crisis that took down dozens of banks and sent most of the Western World into a recession? I would encourage you to read 'The Big Lie' by Barry Ritholtz that completely debunks this nonsense.[1] He even offered a bet of $100,000 to debate anyone in front of a 'jury' about the role of CRA in the crisis (unsurprisingly, he had no takers).…
Comment linking /2009/06/29/what-was-a-subprime-loan-modeled-on/
on “Mt. Gox knowingly traded non-existent Bitcoins for two weeks, filing shows”Submitted Peter Thiel and the Challenging of the Meritocracy | Rortybomb as a story · 3 points
HN discussionGE does build lots of cool engineering things, but those alone couldn't have made it the most valuable company in the world at one point. It also involved a lot of, well, financial engineering, which this guy started to describe better than I could ever have: https://rortybomb.wordpress.com/2011/01/21/immelt-ge-capital... I also remember than in the hot days of early October 2008 there were talks of GE the entire co…
Comment linking /2011/01/21/immelt-ge-capital-and-the-financialization-of-manufacturing/
on “Philip Greenspun Reviews “Lean In””Submitted Persistence of Poverty, and Increasing Marginal Utility as a story · 3 points
HN discussionMike Konczal: Here’s the normal story. Picture you are in a room with 10 people. Each of them has a slice of cake. How much you are willing to pay for a slice of the cake is the ‘marginal utility’ of having it, and the more cake you have the less any more cake is worth to you. You’d be willing to pay a $1 for the first slice of cake, but you’d only be will to pay 90 cents for the second slice. You’d only be willing…
Comment linking /2009/12/03/persistence-of-poverty-and-increasing-marginal-utility/
on “What really drives the poor”Submitted The College Bubble and the Public Defunding of Colleges | Rortybomb as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI never get tired of quoting Mike Konczal: And speaking as someone who has taken graduate coursework in “continental philosophy”, and been walked through the big hits of structural anthropology, Hegelian marxism and Freudian feminism, that graduate macroeconomics class was by far the most ideologically indoctrinating class I’ve ever seen. By a mile. There was like two weeks where the class just copied equations that…
Comment linking /2010/06/29/blogging-and-the-economics-profession/
on “What You Don't Get About the Job Search: Voices of the Jobless”Submitted Foreclosure Fraud For Dummies as a story · 2 points
HN discussionYes. The Fed has spend 30 years ensuring that labor never has the upper hand: http://thinkprogress.org/yglesias/2011/09/14/319359/how-asym... http://rortybomb.wordpress.com/2011/03/18/the-federal-reserv... WRT manufacturing: http://rortybomb.wordpress.com/2011/01/21/immelt-ge-capital-...
Comment linking /2011/01/21/immelt-ge-capital-and-the-financialization-of-manufacturing/
on “The Wealthiest 5% Grabbed Most of the America’s Gains ”Submitted Florida’s Foreclosures Nightmare as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSam Israel - pretended to jump off a bridge Markus Shrenker - pretended he'd crashed his airplane Marc Dreier Allen Stanford Arthur Nadel Nicholas Cosmo Joseph Forte I could probably dredge up a few more -- it seemed like there was one every two weeks from July 2008 - Feb 2009, so these are just the few who were based in the US and who have Wikipedia articles. While the financial reform is mainly being marketed as a…
Comment linking /
on “Get the Anti-Startup and Anti-Angel Provisions Struck From Dodd's Banking Bill”Submitted The difference between private equity and venture capital as a story · 1 points
HN discussionthe conclusion of the linked article that people are still poor because they keep on buying lottery tickets is naive and condescending. Indeed. It is difficult to understand the mind set of the poor without understanding the screaming room: http://rortybomb.wordpress.com/2009/12/03/persistence-of-pov... With that shift in perspective, a number of behaviors that seem irrational start to make a lot more sense.
Comment linking /2009/12/03/persistence-of-poverty-and-increasing-marginal-utility/
on “The sad positive feedback loop of lotteries”Submitted Parsing the Data and Ideology of the We Are 99% Tumblr as a story · 1 points
HN discussionCredit card interest rates don't generally relate to default probabilities in a sane way, as Mike Konczal explains here: http://rortybomb.wordpress.com/2009/05/22/credit-card-reform... There is no rational model that relates your credit card interest rate in a reasonable way to your own actions. If you send in a $5 payment two days late, that's often treated the same as sending in a $5000 payment one month late. But…
Comment linking /2009/05/22/credit-card-reform-does-my-credit-cards-interest-rate-mean-anything/
on “Unintended Consequences: Credit Card Interest Rates now Much Higher”Submitted Can Goliaths Be Innovative? | Rortybomb as a story · 1 points
HN discussionMcArdle is unreadable. In addition to the linked post, I'd recommend Mike Konczal's response to her post on Elizabeth Warren's scholarship: http://rortybomb.wordpress.com/2010/07/27/megan-mcardles-hac... Isaac Chotiner's reporting on her blatant agitprop: http://www.tnr.com/blog/the-plank/megan-mcardles-word-games Ezra Klein on the same subject: http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2009/08/in_defen... and htt…
Comment linking /2010/07/27/megan-mcardles-hack-post-on-elizabeth-warrens-scholarship/
on “Megan McArdle is Always Wrong...”Submitted Inflation: Good for Entrepreneurs as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
