Housekeeping - Blogs and Division of Labor

Slight change to the coverage and focus of our blogs.

Tracking the Economy- the themes to be covered include economic indicators, country economic updates, interviews with economists, IMF reviews, Country Economic Memorandums, economic growth, poverty, economic policy, Small States, Tourism Economics, Statistics.

MTEF- PFM, Public Finance, Debt Management, Public Management and Public Policy.

The Bayesian Heresy- Art, Psychology, Religion, Behavioral Economics, Book Reviews,Current Affairs, Politics,Spirituality, Effective Habits, Personal Productivity, Design, Philosophy, Carnival of Podcasts, Tourism, Parenting, Education.

The Blog University- hopes to be blog version of MIT's OpenCourseWare

Control of Corruption- everything about corruption and governance

Assorted Podcasts

What's wrong with macro-economics-Paul Omerod

New economics- Arnold Kling

State Building in Afghanistan: and Lessons from Seventeenth Century France


The Invention of the Jewish People

Professor Shlomo Sand has triggered a debate with his new book which argues that one of the founding myths of Israel - the exile and return of the Jews from their ancestral land - is a myth.

Why was Christmas banned for almost 20 years in England

A.C. Grayling - A Very Public Philosopher

A.C. Grayling, one of Britain's foremost philosophers and public intellectuals. An extraordinarily wide-ranging writer, Grayling has written plays, he's written works of technical philosophy and he's written about great philosophers: including books on Berkeley, Russell and Wittgenstein and a biography of René Descartes More recently, he's turned his attention to historical topics, with a book on the Allied bombing of civilians in WWII, and that's one of the issues that we discuss with him today: what is the role of the philosopher in assessing the moral validity of the Allies' prosecution of the war against barbarism?

The liar's paradox and other philosophical absurdities

The man who taught Darwin beetles

The parable of the wise ones

Religion and Pluralism in a Divided World
Speaker: Anwar Ibrahim

Studying Islam across times and place: how to compare?
Speaker: Professor John Bowen

Beyond Copenhagen- Lord Stern

Public hospitals - reform overseas

Thailand's democracy

The tale of two cities
Over the past ten years Australian cities and towns have faced water shortages and water restrictions, yet Singapore, which once imported 80 per cent of its water, has become self sufficient. Are there any lessons Australian cities can learn from Singapore?

Babies at risk?
Figures show that the number of babies taken from mothers at birth is rising dramatically, particularly in NSW. Judgments must err on the side of child safety, but there's concerns some babies are taken needlessly. One couple is suing for $18 million.

Mahatma Gandhi: from lawyer to national liberator

The crime gene
Convicted murderer Abdulmalek Bayout recently made legal history when a court in Italy reduced his sentence because it accepted that Bayout was genetically predisposed to being aggressive and violent! Controversial...well it gets worse...the so-called crime gene is more prevalent in some racial groups than others!

Influentional Books Assorted

Mathew Yglesius

William McNeil, Plagues & Peoples: This had a kind of revelatory quality to me, the idea that everything you thought was important about history was actually kind of trivial and the real determinants of human destiny are something else entirely. Guns, Germs, and Steel is arguably the better book in this genre, but I only ever read it because I’d read P&P first so I’m giving McNeil the nod.

Tyler Cowen (who started the meme);

John Stuart Mill, Autobiography. This got me thinking about how one's ideas change, and should change, over the course of a lifetime. Plus Mill is a brilliant thinker and writer more generally.

Bryan Caplan;

Judith Harris, The Nurture Assumption. Harris sucked me into the exciting world of behavioral genetics - and got me thinking about the implications for the meaning of life.

David Henderson;

A Guide to Rational Living, by Albert Ellis. I hit some bumps in my last year in the Ph.D. program at UCLA. I got extreme writer's block and was getting nowhere on my dissertation. I write about this in Making Great Decisions in Business and Life, co-authored with Charley Hooper. I went to see a therapist, Roger Callahan, who gave every one of his new patients a copy. That one book has helped me deal with so many life situations.

Arnold Kling;

Carl Shapiro and Hal Varian, Information Rules. Again, you may find that the examples seem old, but no better book has been written on the economic issues of the information-driven economy. Among other things, this book convinced me that Price Discrimination Explains Everything.

Josh McCabe;

Off the Books by Sudhir Venkatesh. I hate to add something so recent from a guy who turned into one of the “superstars” of sociology, but this was one of the books which got me excited about the kind of things ethnography could do for your analysis. Like Jacobs, Venkatesh finds all sorts of order where others only see chaos.

Will Wilkinson;

A Theory of Justice by John Rawls. I dug into this book with the intention of saying what was really, really wrong with it. Instead, I ended up feeling like I understood political philosophy.

Kieran Healy;

Thomas Schelling, Micromotives and Macrobehavior. So clever, so unassuming, so it made me want to be an economist. Then I took some economics and it wasn’t much like Schelling at all.

William S. Cleveland, Visualizing Data. “This book presents a set of graphical methods for displaying data”. Does it ever. Tufte gets the Presidential Commissions and the high media profile, and deserves all that, but Cleveland shows you how it’s done in practice and wrote the software that lets you code it yourself. For me it opened up the world of serious thinking on data and model visualization for quantitative data.

Russell Arben Fox;

Richard K. Matthews, The Radical Politics of Thomas Jefferson: A Revisionist View. I think I must have underlined every sentence in this book. It was the first book I'd read that made me think both critically and practically about all the stuff I'd been reading about "republicanism" for years.

Updated

'I've photgraphic memory'- Sir Arthur Lewis

A great video of Sir Arthur Lewis from UC.

In the interview Sir Lewis states that he would have preferred to become an engineer but in the colonial England he wouldn't have got a job with it. So instead he became an economist- thanks to British racism.

Related;
W. Arthur Lewis: Evolution of the International Economic Order

Which Nobel Laureate was rejected by The Economist magazine?

They said that they could not hire a black journalist since he would have to interview people who might refuse to see him because of his color

A New Game in Town -Predictalot

Predictalot ;

The basic game play is simple: select a prediction type, customize it, and invest points on it. Yet you'll never run out of odds to explore: you can make hundreds of millions of predictions! The odds on each update are continuously based on other players' predictions and the on-court action...

n technical terms, Predictalot is a combinatorial prediction market of the sort academics like Yahoo! and George Mason University professor Robin Hanson have been dreaming about since early in the decade...

With 9.2 quintillion outcomes, Predictalot is to our knowledge the largest prediction market built, testing the limits of what the wisdom of crowds can produce. Predictalot is a game, and we hope it's fun to play. We'd also like to pave the way for serious use of combinatorial prediction market technology.

Markets like Predictalot, WeatherBill, CombineNet, and Internet advertising systems, to name a few, represent the evolution of markets in the digital age, empowering users with extreme customization

Assorted

Defenders and Demonizers of Credit Default Swaps

The problem with the Value-Added Tax

Do fish stir the ocean?

Algebra in Wonderland

It Takes Two to Tango

What Game Theory Can Tell Us About Terrorism

Building a Better Teacher

Mom, Apple Pie and Mortgages

Solow Quote of the Day

Suppose someone sits down where you are sitting right now and announces to me that he is Napoleon Bonaparte. The last thing I want to do with him is to get involved in a technical discussion of cavalry tactics at the Battle of Austerlitz. If I do that, I’m getting tacitly drawn into the game that he is Napoleon Bonaparte.

- Solow

Intellectuals and Society

Sowell discusses his new book, Intellectuals and Society

We also recommend Posner's book, Public Intellectuals

Another Profile of Krugman- From Asimov to Keynes

Last August, Krugman decided that before he and Wells departed for a bicycle tour of Scotland he would take a couple of days to speak at the sixty-seventh world science-fiction convention, to be held in Montreal. (Krugman has been a science-fiction fan since he was a boy.) At the convention, there was a lot of extremely long hair, a lot of blue hair, and a lot of capes. There was a woman dressed as a cat, there was a woman with a green brain attached to her head with wire, there was a person in a green face mask, there was a young woman spinning wool. There was a Jedi and a Storm Trooper. Those participants who were not dressed as cats were wearing T-shirts with something written on them: “I don’t understand—and I’m a rocket scientist,” “I see dead pixels,” “Math is delicious.” Krugman has always had a nerdy obsession with puns. (He is very proud of a line in one of his textbooks: “Efforts to negotiate a resolution to Europe’s banana split had proved fruitless.”) He also likes costumes. Once, he and Wells gave a Halloween party where the theme was economics topics—two guests came as Asian tigers, several came as hedge funds, one woman came as capital, dressed as a column. Sitting up onstage at the science-fiction convention, Krugman looked happy to be there. It seemed that these were, in some worrying sense, his people.

“Hi, everyone!” he called out.

“Hi!” everyone called back.

Krugman explained that he’d become an economist because of science fiction. When he was a boy, he’d read Isaac Asimov’s “Foundation” trilogy and become obsessed with the central character, Hari Seldon. Seldon was a “psychohistorian”—a scientist with such a precise understanding of the mechanics of society that he could predict the course of events thousands of years into the future and save mankind from centuries of barbarism. He couldn’t predict individual behavior—that was too hard—but it didn’t matter, because history was determined not by individuals but by laws and hidden forces. “If you read other genres of fiction, you can learn about the way people are and the way society is,” Krugman said to the audience, “but you don’t get very much thinking about why are things the way they are, or what might make them different. What would happen if ?”

Econ Podcast of the Day

Phelps on Unemployment and the State of Macroeconomics;

Samuelson's project to correct, clarify and broaden the theory brought into focus its strengths; but also its limitations: It abstracted from the distinctive character of the modern economy--the endemic uncertainty, ambiguity, diversity of beliefs, specialization of knowledge and problem solving. As a result it could not capture, or endogenize, the observable phenomena that are endemic to the modern economy--innovation, waves of rapid growth, big swings in business activity, disequilibria, intense employee engagement and workers' intellectual development. The best and brightest of the neoclassicals saw these defects but lacked a micro-theory to address them.

Sex, Lies and Economists

Sounds like an interesting book project;

A short chapter will cover Bernard Mandeville, author of "An Essay upon Whoring: A Modest Defence of Publick Stews," which made the case for state-run brothels. He congratulated the city fathers of Amsterdam for tolerating "Houses in which Women are hired as publickly as Horses at a Livery Stable." Mandeville's simultaneous celebration of both free markets and licentious behavior posed a problem for Adam Smith's generation, which had to find a way to respond to Mandeville in making their case for markets on ethical grounds. Mandeville reappears centuries later in Keynes' General Theory, in making his case for the need to stimulate demand.

EconTalk- A History of Time

Economics Roundtable: Granger and Engle from UCTV

Book Recommendation

Intellectuals and Society
- Thomas Sowell

January- The month of Samuelson

This January we will be celebrating the achievements of Paul Samuelson. Every month we plan to celebrate an eminent economist- a new feature we are introducing on the blog for 2010.

Related:
Assorted on Samuelson

Which bloggers are attending AEA

Assorted on AEA meetings- will keep updating;

Healthcare Economist;

Joseph Stiglitz will give the keynote address on “Homoeconomicus: The Impact of the Economic Crisis on Economic Theory.”

Of interest to above: The Current Economic Crisis and Lessons for Economic Theory Eastern Economic Journal, forthcoming

Tweedledumb and Tweedledangerous

Can you guess how many Austrian economists made the AEA calendar?

Environmental Economist;

As scientists struggle to predict exactly how global climate change will affect our environment, economists are grappling with another question: How well can humans adapt?

Arnold Kling;

I agree with his view that the housing bubble was caused much more by regulatory failure than monetary policy failure

Harvard’s Feldstein: Economy Might Run Out of Steam in ‘10

Krugman on the State of the Economy

Report from AEA meeting, Part I

A Daddy’s Dream: The AEA Economists Calendar

No to Bernanke

AEA Humor Session

AEA 2010 Papers Tag Cloud: Look Ma, We’re Relevant!

Keynes: The Return of the Master

Keynes: The Return of the Master - a recent discussion from World Bank

The author’s last note touched on Keynes’ idea of risk and his suggestions for developing countries. In developing countries, one can calculate the amount of fixed political parameters, without taking into consideration the authorities in charge. What remains uncertain is the political framework, however. Development policy must center on an attempt to establish constant and stable political parameters as a first priority.

Assorted Economic Literacy

What Is the Price Elasticity of Demand for the H1N1 Vaccine?

What's the price elasticity of college in Pittsburgh?

Sen. Vitter Presents End-of-Term Exam For Bernanke

Nine Observations about Investment

The last of the great general economists died on December 13th, aged 94

What is it with Microeconomists?

Assorted on Samuelson

Edward L. Glaeser;

When Robert Lucas, the Nobel laureate who micro-founded macroeconomics and challenged Keynes, decided to switch from history to economics, he spent a summer reading Samuelson’s Ph.D. dissertation, “The Foundations of Economic Analysis,” by “working through the first four chapters, line by line, going back to my calculus books when I needed to.” As a result, “by the beginning of fall quarter I was as good an economic technician as anyone on the Chicago faculty.

David Warsh:

John Maynard Keynes may have had more influence on policy makers, Milton Friedman on citizens, Kenneth Arrow on economic theory, but Samuelson had more influence on the way economics is done today, and the purposes to which it is put, than any other economist of the twentieth century.

David Henderson;

Arrow challenged Samuelson's agnosticism about the relevance of economics, which spilled over to Samuelson's agnosticism about economic policy. Quoting Samuelson's statement, "there are no rules concerning the proper role of the government that can be established by a priori reasoning," Arrow replied, "such banalities are not entirely to the point. Economic theory, being abstract, cannot of course state that government expenditures should be 31.732 percent of gross national product. But it can state general principles which relate the allocation of resources between public and private uses to the underlying preferences of individuals, including those for public goods."

Arnold Kling:

A lot of the feeling about him is correlated with how one feels about math

Krugman;

There have been hedgehogs; there have been foxes; and then there was Paul Samuelson.

Peter Boettke;

Samuelson famously remarked once that he didn't care who wrote the nation's laws, as long as he wrote the nation's economic textbooks. Which he indeed did. His Economics became the leading textbook for college freshman, and his Foundations became the leading text for first-year graduate students in economics.

Obituaries: NYT, Telegraph, WSJ,

Multimedia:
Paul Samuelson, Nobel Economics Laureate, Dies at 94
The National Bureau of Economic Research's James Poterba, Bank of Israel Governor Stanley Fischer, Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Robert Solow, Carnegie Mellon University's Allan Meltzer and Columbia University's Jagdish Bhagwati talk with Bloomberg's Tom Keene about Paul Samuelson

Summers Says Paul Samuelson Had Passion for Economics

Assorted Podcasts

Most of the podcasts are from the National Economists Club;

Productivity and Economic Development
Bill Lewis, Former managing partner, McKinsey Global Institute

The Power of Productivity: Wealth, Poverty, and the Threat to Global Stability

The Tyranny of the Market: Why you can’t always get what you Want
Joel Waldfogel

The Economics, Policy, and Politics of Poverty Reduction
Jared Bernstein

Scroogenomics: Why You Shouldn't Buy Presents for the Holidays

The Economic Naturalist

Evolution in Central Bank Governance around the World
Ellen Meade

Economic Analysis and Cost-Benefit Analysis: Substitutes or Complements?
Chester Spatt, Chief Economist
Securities and Exchange Commission

An Anatomy of Jobless Recoveries: Will Employment Lag Output in 2009-2010 as it did in 2001-03? If Not, Why Not?

Innovation Economics: A 21st Century Alternative to the Neo-Classical

The Economic Naturalist's Field Guide

The Debate on the International Monetary System

Keynes’ original proposal envisaged a global bank (the International Clearing Union or ICU), which would issue its own currency (bancor), based on the value of 30 representative commodities including gold, exchangeable against national currencies at fixed rates. All trade accounts would be measured in bancor, while each country would maintain a bancor account vis-à-vis the ICU (expected to be balanced within a small margin), and also have an overdraft allowance vis-à-vis the ICU. When countries experienced large trade deficits (more than half of the bancor overdraft allowance), they would pay interest on their accounts, undergo economic adjustments (possibly also capital controls) and devalue their currencies. Conversely, countries with large trade surpluses would also be subject to a similar charge and required to appreciate their exchange rates. This mechanism would bring in a smooth symmetry of adjustments across countries and avoid global imbalances.

Interesting new staff position paper from the Fund.

Book recommendations

Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth
Apostolos Doxiadis

SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance
-Steven D. Levitt, Stephen J. Dubner

What the Dog Saw: And Other Adventures
-Malcolm Gladwell

The Big Questions: Tackling the Problems of Philosophy with Ideas from Mathematics, Economics and Physics
-Steven Landsburg

The Predictioneer’s Game: Using the Logic of Brazen Self-Interest to See and Shape the Future.

The Storm: The World Economic Crisis and what it means

The Storm: The World Economic Crisis and what it means by Vince Cable

The Great Depression Surge of September 2008

via Google Trends

For Discussion: What's the reason for the search surge in the latter half of 2008.

The Myth of the Rational Market

Justin Fox Sees Need to Open OTC Derivatives Markets

Capitalism 3.0

Capitalism 3.0- Dani Rodrik lecture