The ads are well produced, but they bring the gas tax holiday idea to the attention of thousands of voters who've never heard of the idea. And they do so at the expense of the Obama campaign.
In EconoPundit's opinion this is not what you'd call too swift.
Since oil is traded in dollars, the Bush/Greenspan inflation is taking its toll. To protect themselves against the depreciating dollar, oil producers jack up the price of crude. The less the dollar is worth, the more the price goes up...Meanwhile, hedge fund billionaires are making their own contribution to higher gas prices. We can be sure that they are taking their shrinking dollars out of their piggy banks and investing them in something that not only keeps its value but renders a profit, and that's oil. Ordinary people watch their savings shrivel as their government bonds and certificates of deposit lose spending power. Yet the billionaire class is preserving its capital by speculating in black gold. A byproduct of their speculations is a persistent rise in oil prices.
So my question is this: why aren't ordinary people -- by themselves, through pension funds, or whatever -- trading "value-losing" government bonds and certificates of deposit for the same financial instruments the so-called "billionaire class" somehow mysteriously uses to preserve its capital by "speculating in black gold"?
UPDATE: Wait -- I think I get it! They speculate in oil, and that causes the price of oil to rise, and they make money because the price is rising, right? That's fabulous! (Those devious billionaire class speculators!) It works just like the tech stock bubble and the housing boom! I'm gonna run out right now and preserve my capital just like those smart billionaire class guys!
UPDATE II: I was about to simply link to this saner article to suggest a more balanced view (despite occasional heavygoing rhetoric) until I noticed von Hoffman's essay seems like an almost paragraph-by-paragraph sensationalized/simplified summary/rewrite for the anticapitalist set. Read both and decide for yourself.
I know Charles Krauthammer once studied statistics, but I think he's getting a little rusty:
Bottom line: unless Obama was caught on tape nodding as Wright screamed his obscenities at the United States, or Michelle gives another speech "from the heart" about how hard she has struggled and how in return she has had no pride in this country, or there is another off-the-cuff, but recorded sneer at the white working class (50/50 chance on all four counts), I think he will weather the current storm and get the nomination. Obama evokes pure emotion and raw politics now, and logic, honesty, and accountability have little to do with his nomination bid.
Okay, now let's compute the odds. In cases like this we're dealing with neither conditional nor joint but with marginal probability. You'll find a quick review here, but all you need remember we add up rather than multiply the likelihoods that various events may happen.
Let's use Krauthammer's examples and assume probabilities extremely generous to the Obama campaign. Assume the likelihood Obama was caught on tape nodding at Wright's obscenties is low -- say one in 10 chances. What about an "angry and spiteful Wright [producing] some letter, e-mail, etc. that reveals a kindred soul in Obama"? We'd have to say this is more likely, but still assign a low probability of, let's say, one in three. How about Michelle? How likely is it she will come forward with another negative interview? Be generous, and assume handlers have her under control and there's no more than one-in-ten chances she'll slip up and once again reveal her true feelings about the U.S. of A. Finally, what are the odds Obama himself will slip and once again reveal a little hostility towards all us Joe Sixpacks? Pretty likely something like this will slip out when he's tired but be generous -- call it one in four.
Okay, now add up the probabilities. .10+.33+.1+.25=78.3.
According to these hypothetical numbers there's a 78% chance the Obama ship will sink. Charles' 50/50 estimate may be way too low. (For the curious: a one-in-eight chance of any of the four events taking place generates the 50/50 probability cited in Charles Krauthammer's editorial.)
Iran will come to the table with its own clear set of demands: that the US cease worldwide imperialism, stop funding Israel, and end all blogs (like EconoPundit) issuing noxious statements (like this one).
It's time for the Federal Reserve to stop reducing the federal funds rate, because the likely benefit is small compared to the potential damage.
Lower interest rates could raise the already high prices of energy and food, which are already triggering riots in developing countries. In order to offset the inflationary impact of higher imported commodity prices, central banks in those countries may raise interest rates. Such contractionary policies would reduce real incomes and exacerbate political instability.
I think Mr. Feldstein is here stating an important instance of the essay's central (and in my opinion rather strange) thesis: raising US interest rates may harm Americans, but it will benefit the world by a much greater degree.
The impact of low interest rates on commodity-price inflation is different from the traditional inflationary effect of easy money. The usual concern is that lowering interest rates stimulates economic activity to a point at which labor and product markets cause wages and prices to rise. That is unlikely to happen in the U.S. in the coming year. The general weakness of the economy will keep most wages and prices from rising more rapidly.
But high unemployment and low capacity utilization would not prevent lower interest rates from driving up commodity prices. Many factors have contributed to the recent rise in the prices of oil and food, especially the increased demand from China, India and other rapidly growing countries. Lower interest rates also add to the upward pressure on these commodity prices – by making it less costly for commodity investors and commodity speculators to hold larger inventories of oil and food grains.
Lower interest rates induce investors to add commodities to their portfolios. When rates are low, portfolio investors will bid up the prices of oil and other commodities to levels at which the expected future returns are in line with the lower rates.
An interest rate-induced rise in the price of oil also contributes indirectly to higher prices of food grains. It does so by making it profitable for farmers to devote more farm land to growing corn for ethanol. The resulting reduction in acreage devoted to producing food crops causes the supply of those commodities to decline and their prices to rise.
It seems obvious to the reader (but apparently not to Mr. Feldstein) the central problem is subsidized and regulation-induced overproduction of ethanol -- not interest rates.
Rising food and energy prices can contribute significantly to the inflation rate and the cost of living in the U.S. The 25% weight of food and energy in the U.S. consumer price index means that a 10% rise in the prices of food and energy adds 2.5% to the overall price level. Commodity price inflation is of particular concern now that the CPI has increased 4% in the past 12 months. Surveys indicate that households are expecting a 4.8% rise in the coming year.
Once again, the reader is directed towards a conclusion different from Mr. Feldstein's: that the US economy is absorbing food and energy price increases rather comfortably because they amout to only 2.5% of the overall price level.
In lower-income, emerging-market countries, food and energy are generally a larger part of consumer spending. A rise in these commodity prices can therefore add proportionally more to the cost of living in those countries, and therefore depress real incomes to a greater extent than in the U.S.
Here is another statement of the central thesis: we ought to sacrifice for the world's economic benefit. I am amazed Mr. Feldstein doesn't even suspect some readers might question the ethics of this prescription.
Government actions to dilute these effects by increased subsidies on the prices of energy and food add to the government deficits, reducing the national saving available for investment in plant and equipment that would otherwise contribute to faster economic growth.
The argument's bizarre nature is at this point growing exponentially. Consider what this paragraph means if, for example, we imagine China as suffering (as is the case) from major inflation of pork and rice prices. Simply tune into NPR to hear Chinese persons-on-the-street calling for government regulation of food prices. Is it the responsibility of the US taxpayer to save the Chinese dictatorship from itself?
The rise in the U.S. inflation rate, and the adverse effects in emerging market countries, might be defensible if lower interest rates could significantly stimulate demand and reduce the risk of a deep recession. But under current conditions, reducing the federal funds interest rate from the current 2.25% by 50 or 75 basis points is not likely to do much to stimulate demand.
The important phrase "not likely to do much" says it all: lower interest rates will indeed stimulate demand by some small degree. (Remember the real-life multiplier is never anywhere near textbook numerical examples. We lecture about multipliers of five or seven, while Ray Fair computes the actual real-world dynamic multiplier at just 1.4. In other words -- even expansionary fiscal policy is "not likely to do much" to stimulate real-world actual demand.)
The current conditions in the housing industry and in credit markets mean that a further lowering of interest rates will have a smaller impact on demand than in previous recessions. In previous recessions, lower rates stimulated aggregate demand by inducing increased home building. But with the massive inventory of unsold homes – up 50% from a few years ago – a further cut in the fed funds rate would have little effect on housing construction.
Once again, "little effect" is not the same as no effect at all. Feldstein is asking for sacrifice.
Moreover, lowering the fed funds rate has not brought down mortgage interest rates. While the fed funds rate is down three percentage points from this time last year, mortgage interest rates are down by less than 0.5 percentage points.
We repeat: "down by less than 0.5 percentage points" is not the same as down by zero.
The dysfunctional state of the credit market means that many individuals and businesses are unable to get credit. Lowering interest rates will not stimulate demand for those who cannot get credit.
And raising interest rates will make their situation better? Please!
Economic recovery will require resolving the difficult problems of the credit markets, dealing with the millions of homeowners who may now be tempted to default on mortgages that exceed the value of their homes, and reducing the risk that the ongoing decline in house prices will push millions of additional homeowners into a vulnerable, negative equity condition. A lower fed funds rate will not solve any of those problems.
Perhaps a lower fed funds rate won't solve these problems, but a higher rate will almost certainly exacerbate them.
The first candidate to effectively identify himself (or maybe herself) with this proposal will be the next U.S. President. (The principle of minimum differentiation suggests they'll all adopt some variant of the idea.)
1. Has Barak Obama ever gone on record against those routinely using the words "dog," "pig," or "monkey" in association with ethnic groups other than his own?
2. Under an Obama Presidency, what would be okay that you could say (without getting fined or ticketed?)
3. Why does the Sun Times' headline claim Linda Ramirez-Sliwinski "quit" when she was fired, and why does it quote her as saying something quite different from what (according to the story) she actually said?
The narrative that Iran (and then of course OPEC) will, any day now, switch from dollars to Euros (or something else?) has been floating around the internet since, well, the first days of EconoPundit itself.
Guess what -- the story is back! (Just like, well, uh, a "bad penny?")
See also Bohuslav Martinu opera of the same name...
News is just now leaking out that Jules Dassin died three days ago. His adaptation of Kazanzakis' The Greek Passion (US title "He Who Must Die," GB title "Christ Recrucified") was just shown on the new MGM HD cable channel, and I can report it was amazing to see a clearer, more-riveting print on HDTV than was ever seen in 16mm at all the university film society meetings of the 1960s.
We are checking as often as possible -- hourly until we move off into the wilderness of economics teaching late today -- for this quarter's update of Fairmodel.
Now that Ray and his assistants have updated the numbers and reesimated the model, what will the prediction be? Recession? Disaster? Recovery?
Don't touch that dial!
UPDATE: Oops! Drinking way too much Starbucks, I guess. The forecasting quarter doesn't end for yet another 30 days or so. (Thanks to last night's students who quietly pointed this out.)
Baker's central theme [is] that "Hitlerism and Churchillism are in fact the same thing. The difference is only one of degree."
Coming from a lesser writer, this argument could be dismissed as the sort of silly, everything-bad-is-our-fault self-loathing common among the left wing. But Baker is one of the most skilled writers at work today...
His biggest misstep was "Checkpoint," a brief reflection on the desirability of murdering George W. Bush that struck some critics as ideological, perhaps even unhinged.
That same charge could be leveled against Human Smoke. While he uses its factual form to press the case that the barbarity we all too easily ascribe to the Germans was invented by the British in India, he seems naive and partisan in places, automatically dismissing the possibility of higher British motives while credulously parroting German propaganda as if it represents historical truth.
The book is also repetitive. We see too many draft resisters go to jail. World War II was many things, but a testament to the importance of pacifism it was not. The savvy reader quickly grasps that Churchill is evil itself -- he has no redeeming qualities, apparently -- and yet Baker keeps laying on the lash. We get it.
The book's biggest flaw is to draw moral equivalency between the Nazis and the West. Refusing to admit refugee children into your country is heartless, maybe even vile. But it is on a different scale of sin altogether than conceiving and creating the machinery to murder them. No matter how ineffectual or cruel Churchill's bombing campaign was, he was still reacting to Hitler's conquest of Europe.
Baker takes the standard lesson of World War II -- that the West failed at Munich by backing down and allowing Hitler to unleash destruction -- and inverts it. Forget about confronting Hitler sooner, we shouldn't have fought him at all. Or the Japanese for that matter. The pacifists were right, Baker claims, suggesting -- somewhat idiotically -- that Europe's Jews might have all ended up safe and happy on Madagascar had the Allies not made things tough for the Nazis. We made him do it.
Yes, handing the world over to Hitler with a Gandhian blessing would have spared us from the depravity of bombing innocents. But what then would our world look like? Baker never pauses to wonder.
Still, as much as I found myself disagreeing with Human Smoke, even despising it in parts, I'm glad I stuck with this odd moral shell game of a book. Parts of it read like history as it would have been written by the Nazis had they won the war. But it also takes a nightmare that we are too familiar with, all too comfortable with, and retells it afresh, poking and prodding us, challenging our self-assigned sense of goodness, and ultimately keening at the charnel house that Europe became for six horrible years in the middle of the 20th century.
Rev. James Meeks -- Barak Obama's new pastor -- seems to have been one of the prime movers behind the much-condemned Chicago 2006 Halloween "Haunted House" that showed scenes in Hell occupied by homosexuals, abortionists, and Buddhists.
Rich Lowry provides a standard 101 lecture on inflation without asking some of the more interesting 101 questions. For example: why isn't ongoing inflation front page news? (Maybe because ordinary people don't really notice it that much?) Why don't ordinary people notice inflation all that much? (Maybe because, unlike the US in the 1970's, there are more lower-cost substitutes to choose from? For just about everything?) What do lower-cost substitutes have to do with inflation? (Maybe they allow ordinary people to maintain their standard of living by switching from higher-cost items to lower-cost substitutes?)
Look for lots of new stories like this one about just how bad is Ohio's economy. Then check out union membership by state, and ask yourself, are there any questions raised by these facts?
We live across the street from last Saturday night's Obama fundraiser, and saw all the limos and SUVs dropping off extremely well-dressed contributors. Anyway, one of Obama's supporters was quoted in this story as follows, but I think there's an incorrect use of an important word in what follows:
I'm nauseaus! I want it to be over. I want him to have the nomination, and I want him to be the president of the United States," said Obama supporter Deborah Koppelman.
(I suppose some would say she really is nauseaus rather than nauseated, but anyway...)
Upon exactly what was the United States of American built upon? (Scroll to the bottom of this article to find the answer. Hint: The first letter is "t" and the there's an "x" in there somewhere!)
David Malpass, in an email, describes current activities in credit markets. Even though the economy's vital signs are actually still largely okay, the following must be considered:
"...the turmoil in credit markets has worsened materially as the dollar hits new lows. The spread between the bonds of government sponsored agencies and Treasuries widened sharply on March 6, as did the spread between Italian bonds and German bonds, showing zero risk tolerance. Showing the depth of the risk aversion, the spread even widened between bonds issued by different parts of the federal government (Treasuries versus Ginnie Mae bonds issued by the Federal Housing Administration.) Ten-year swap spreads and the TED spread between Treasuries and euro-dollars widened, showing a lack of confidence by banks in the credit of other banks.
In addition to dollar weakness, a circular mark-to-market process is a key factor driving the credit market deterioration. As we understand one example, a major bank sold a small group of bonds at a low price late in February. This caused a mark-to-market decline in similar bonds elsewhere. A margin lender raised its margin requirement, creating a margin call for a hedge fund owning similar bonds. Unable to meet the margin call, the hedge fund sold bonds quickly, adding to the volatility in that segment of the bond market. This began to impact the volatility in agency bonds, causing increased margin requirements on them. As volatility on agency bonds increased, margin calls went out, forcing sales, driving prices down and forcing lower marks, a process still underway after today's market close.
From a macro-economic standpoint, this is resulting in a further sharp deleveraging of the global financial system. Leveraged bond holders sell, reducing their debt but causing losses for their investors or owners. The bonds, now with higher yields, find their way into the hands of less leveraged holders. The amount of debt in the system declines relative to the equity capital.
While traumatic, we don't think this deleveraging process has a big impact on GDP. The losses are to balance sheets, usually large ones. The system is evolving toward less leverage with wider spreads and a better matching of maturities. This should allow future growth in output despite the losses on past wealth. We're encouraged by the speed with which the muni bond crisis of recent weeks calmed. Some municipalities will pay more interest going forward in comparison with the unusually low interest payments of recent years.
We're not sure when the credit crisis will subside, though at some point credit spreads will be wider than credit risk justifies. We think a Washington preference for a stronger dollar would solve the problem, but is unlikely at this point. Global reservoirs of liquidity are full, but are not stepping in to buy the marked-down dollar-denominated credit instruments. Instead, capital has been fleeing away from the dollar into commodities and Asia.
The latest credit market turmoil is probably not enough to stop U.S. GDP growth in the first quarter. If the turmoil persists, though, it will weaken second quarter growth substantially, reducing employment, investment and consumption."
Now [Europe is] living with the results of [its] arrogance: while [Europe brands] the U.S. illiberal, [the US] grows its population, diversifies and assimilates, and offers economic opportunity and jobs; although, for a time [Europe has] become wealthy -- given [its] lack of defense spending, commercial unity, and protectionism -- but only up to a point: soon the bill comes due as [it ages], face[s] a demographic crisis, [and becomes] imprisoned by secular appetites and ever growing entitlements. Once one insists on an equality of result, not one of mere opportunity, then, as Plato warned, there is no logical end to what the government will think up and the people will demand.
And more:
Europeans have turned their backs on the "Sermon on the Mount" and adopted in its place a Rousseau or Foucault as totems. Atheism is bad enough when it worships the Calf of Pure Reason, but when logic and rationalism are themselves replaced by postmodern relativism, then the loss of god, and the trade off become an even worse deal.
Read this carefully. Yes, the dollar's fall is fuelling lots of bad stuff -- but (say the numbers) if it weren't for the dollar-related export surge, we'd be in recession right now.
Glenn seems to have missed the point here -- "Don't ask don't tell" is a great description of how American universities deal with politically conservative faculty and adjuncts.
With the fair tax, you end the underground economy. Drug dealers, prostitutes, pimps, illegals -- everybody has to pay the tax at the retail level -- so right now those billions of dollars, that people like you and me are having to make up for, 'cause other folks are working under the table, now everybody's paying into the system. That's one of the reasons that it really is a fair tax.
Drug dealers? Prostitutes? Pimps? We'll somehow start collecting sales taxes from them? What planet is this guy from?
A new email from Jeffrey Wrase (Chief Economist of the Senate Republican Joint Economic Committee) contains vital information that is (of course) being totally ignored by the MSM. We quote from the email in its entirety:
A recent report, published by the Democratic staff of the Joint Economic Committee and titled “War at any Price?” contains a fatal flaw in basic economic analysis that leads to an overstatement of war costs of over $1 trillion. The flaw is that the authors of the document double count resource costs.
There are other difficulties with the estimates of war costs arrived at in the report that I do not address here, but the double counting of resource costs alone leads to an incorrect overstatement of war costs of over $1 trillion.
When accounting for resource costs of war-related expenditures, the authors include direct resource costs (“Direct Appropriations” in Chart 5 of the report) and add to those costs some opportunity costs of the use of those resources. As is taught in any introductory economics course, when thinking about opportunity costs, it is correct to say that use of a resource in one activity has a cost that can be taken to be the value of the foregone opportunity to have used that resource in the next-most-highly valued use. It is fundamentally wrong, however, to take the cost of using a resource in one activity to be the amount of resources used plus values associated with what would have taken place had the resources been used in the next-most-highly valued use. Such an error amounts to double counting and is wrong. The fundamental flaw in economic analysis of double counting in the report by the democratic staff of the Joint Economic Committee leads the report to overstate war costs by over $1 trillion.
In the Democratic JEC report (although it is not entirely clear given the unintelligible and convoluted explanation of “methodology”), the economic cost of the government obtaining a unit of resources today from private investors is taken to be more than one unit, which is incorrect. The report adds to the one unit (direct appropriations) some or all of the return that could otherwise have been obtained in the private sector, had that unit been used for private investment. Those foregone returns do represent opportunity costs, in terms of foregone future investment returns that could have arisen had there not been government borrowing and use of resources today. However, it is incorrect to add to the resource cost of one unit of resources used by the government today the amounts which could have been made available had the resources been used in private investments rather than current war effort expenditure.
Note that the notion that government borrows to obtain resources today does not change the fact that the resource cost of obtaining one unit of resources from the private sector and using it in war efforts is one unit. With capital markets in equilibrium, the present value of the amount government repays over time remains one unit of resources. The Democratic “analysis” is not one of accounting for economic effects of crowding out. Their analysis has no interest rate (or exchange rate) effects, and consequently is not an analysis of possible economic effects of crowding out. Such an analysis is possible, preferably using a dynamic, stochastic, general equilibrium model of the economy (the language of modern macroeconomic analysis), but that is not what the Democratic report performs. Rather, the report simply adds to already-accounted-for costs some opportunity costs associated with government spending, which leads to double counting.
Note, also, that the Democratic JEC “methodology” description makes no mention of differential social rates of return between private investment and government spending. Consequently, the authors of the document cannot be making calculations of costs based on differential returns that they perceive, let alone try to estimate.
Yes, had a unit of resources used by government today on war efforts been used in private investment, the economy would have obtained returns from that private investment tomorrow. The present value of that foregone opportunity is, however, simply one unit—an amount already accounted for in the direct appropriations figure used to tally war costs in the JEC report. To add the foregone return (gross or net) to the current direct resource cost, represented by appropriated current spending, is to double count. One of the first lessons in any elementary introduction to economics is to account for opportunity cost, but not to value the cost of a use of resources by adding to the amount of resources used the opportunity cost of those resources. That represents double counting and is wrong.
The magnitude of the error in the Democratic JEC war cost computation amounts to $870 billion (“Foregone Investment Return”) plus $220 billion (“Interest to Foreign Owners”) shown in Chart 5 of the report. By committing a fundamental error in economic “analysis” alone, the Democratic JEC report overstates war costs by over $1 trillion. The analysis in the Democratic JEC report is fundamentally flawed, and no policy or policy discussion should be based on the findings of the flawed report.
This new treasury study on mobility will blast current "progressive" critiques of the US economy right out of the bathtub. Its strength lies not only in the fact that it agrees with vitually all similar studies carried out using the University of Michigan's Panel Study on Income Dynamics, but, more important, its sample size is massive by comparison with the PSID.
Presumably this is why it is being totally ignored by the the mainstream media.
World War II was hugely romanticized in terms of its fiction. There were unambiguous villains, and the feeling we were fighting the right people over the right issues, as opposed to this war, which many people feel is misguided.
But wait -- aren't all the current Hollywood films made in opposition to the war? Aren't they precisely targeted toward an audience feeling this war is misguided?
I'll be checking with our financial advisor later to find out just how much my mom has actually lost on Citibank. (I'm sort of nervous because I can't remember if she bought it on my advice or not.)
But seriously folks -- this is the sort of event I used to think demonstrated the indadequacies of capitalism, but now realize (or think, hope, etc.) demonstrates the system working exactly the way it's supposed to.
Hold onto Milton Friedman's line of thinking -- the houses built during the boom are still there even though their owners may change and the numbers on a few million pieces of paper may shift around a little. What's changed is how we think about things -- not physical reality itself!
UPDATE: This also illustrates the limitations of large models. Think about it. What failed here are major computational models dealing with $trillions of investors' and financial intermediaries' dollars. How reliable are all those huge global warming models with nobody's dollars at stake? (Or at least with nobody's but your dollars at stake!)
Our sister blog Table Pads has made contact with a cool new (to us at least) web site called Mid Century Modern Interiors. Their posted Haloween photo from 1957 for some reason or other has absolutely captured my imagination:
US GDP today exceeded expectations after growing by 3.9 per cent during the third quarter as the Federal Reserve prepared to announce whether it will cut the interest rate against a weakening dollar.
The rate of GDP outstripped expectations of 3.0 per cent growth, suggesting that the US economy is weathering current global difficulties brought on by the sub-prime mortgage crisis and a lack of liquidity in the financial markets.
The predicted growth rates for the next four quarters are 4.1, 3.7, 3.4, and 3.1 percent, respectively. The higher growth rates in the next two quarters are primarily due to a predicted inventory correction---see variable IVF. The unemployment rate falls slightly to 4.1 percent by the beginning of 2009. The jobs variable, JF, is predicted to increase in the four quarters by 1.5, 2.1, 2.3, and 2.2 percent, respectively.
UPDATE: You should note the "expected" 3.0% growth reflects economic punditry's thoughts as of, roughly, one week ago. The 3.9% model prediction, on the other hand, dates from (roughly) three months ago.
UPDATE II: There's a new forecast memo out. 3.4% growth predicted for next quarter. Please note the above link goes to the current forecast memo, so don't be surprised if the nummbers are different.
All my friends and family know which side of this issue I'm on.
But I'd like everyone to consider one little fact left out of the, uh, "equation" (so to speak): looking over campus as a whole, aren't these the faculties with the least overt committment to leftism and political correctness?
UPDATE: Let me explain. This can easily turn into a dispute between faculty in the "social" sciences and those in real science. If you prefer, you can have it as a dispute between faulty in the social sciences versus those in "real" science.
It doesn't matter where you put the scare quotes. Faculty in the real sciences can easily charge social science departments as lacking just as much political diversity as they (the real sciences) may lack gender diversity.
I am beginning to think widespread formation of "Conservative Studies" departments is the only practical answer to all this.
Money Magazine (which I don't read that often I'm afraid) is right on in this new little article:
From an economist’s point of view, we live in strange times. So strange they now have a snappy label: the Great Moderation. In the 13 years from 1970 to 1983, the U.S. went through four recessions. In the 24 years since, we’ve had two. The latest, which came around the time of 9/11, turned out to be quite mild. Interest rates, unemployment and inflation have all trended sharply down.
What happened?...[T]most obvious change is that the world became flat, to paraphrase Thomas Friedman...In the ’80s and ’90s, the Iron Curtain fell and market economics took hold in Eastern Europe and Asia. At home, the government deregulated banking and transportation. And all over the place, money and goods started moving faster and farther than ever before.
Moving from microeconomics to macro requires you start imagining the economy as passing "quantity" rather than strictly "price" information. The "Great Moderation" is, then, the increasing rapidity with which quantity information can now flow.
UPDATE: If you want to know where I've been and what I've been doing, go to this site and imagine how long it takes to learn sufficient 3d graphics techniques to do it mostly yourself without hiring others. (By the way, the community of 3D graphics folks is at one and the same time strange, wonderful, and slightly scary. Maybe we can talk more about this stuff in the future!)
[T]he basic medium through which columnists operate [is] dying a slow death. It's a rare week when some major paper doesn't announce new layoffs, buyouts or other severe cost-cutting measures, such as reducing the size of the paper to save on costly newsprint, as The New York Times will do next month. At some point, the bloodletting will end, but not before many more papers fold. Eventually, we will probably be left with a handful of national papers, with all the rest devoted exclusively to local news...I think there will always be a market for quality commentary, however, and some day someone will figure out a better way to make money from it. In the meantime, I have decided to devote myself to writing books, where authors still have control over their output and can make better money. I will continue to pen the occasional column, but this is the last one I plan to write on a weekly basis. I offer thanks to all my readers and editors for their support.
As I am sure he knows, traditional supporters of newspapers -- advertisers (this one for example) -- have been seeing the same problems from a different angle. Every year advertising rates go up even as circulation falls. All small business is being driven to the internet. Period.
Then, in 2003, the same data set, which in their [IPCC’s] publications, in their website, was a straight line—suddenly it changed, and showed a very strong line of uplift, 2.3 mm per year, the same as from the tide gauge. And that didn’t look so nice. It looked as though they had recorded something; but they hadn’t recorded anything. It was the original one which they had suddenly twisted up, because they entered a “correction factor,” which they took from the tide gauge. So it was not a measured thing, but a figure introduced from outside. I accused them of this at the Academy of Sciences in Moscow —I said you have introduced factors from outside; it’s not a measurement. It looks like it is measured from the satellite, but you don’t say what really happened. And they answered, that we had to do it, because otherwise we would not have gotten any trend!
Why all the hatred all of a sudden? Nobody gives the Amish a hard time. Nobody tells the Hasidic Jews they should try to dress like everyone else.
I'd suggest one reason. Fear -- just of the unknown, the "other," or the "different" -- but rather fear of what might be hidden under or disguised by those all-encompassing robes.
Maybe I'm prejudiced, but all that suicide bombing scares me.
