notes on efficiency (1)
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Benz (2)
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Pluckings from the whirlwind (2)
1 day, 18 hours
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I've been watching the Wire and thinking about bureaucracy.In a small company/drug gang/ police department, people dare, and they make mistakes. They're trying to get the job done just to survive. This success grows them something worth owning. And more people join. And to succeed, players must no longer just survive as a team, but look good as individuals. So it becomes less about success than about covering your ass.The thing is, if you're covering ...
Sell Sarbanes-Oxley (1)
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Administrator (1012)
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Economics on Polymeme (20)
1 day, 18 hours
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THE NEW YORK SUN : If Sarbanes-Oxley were a stock, we'd recommend selling it short. It's only a law, of course, and can't be sold in the literal sense. But on Friday a panel of judges who ride the District of Columbia Circuit of the United States Court of Appeals put it in what, in Constitutional terms, amounts to play... READ MORE
Debunking the Tragedy of the Commons (1)
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John Quarterman (2)
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Perilocity (2)
1 day, 19 hours
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Interesting article here making a point that should have been obvious for forty years. When Garrett Hardin published his famous article about the "tragedy of the commons" in Science in December 1968, he cited no evidence whatsoever for his assertion that a commons would always be overgrazed; that community-owned resources would always be mismanaged. Quite a bit of evidence was already available, but he ignored it, because it said quite the opposite: villagers would band ...
"Unsmearing the Smear" (1)
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Mark Thoma (78)
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Economist's View (79)
1 day, 22 hours
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Free Exchange looks at a report on "How unscrupulous campaign strategists are taking advantage of a quirk in our brains – and what reporters can do to stop helping them": Unsmearing the smear, Free Exchange, The Econmist: An interesting behavioural look at the world of political mud-slinging... It helpfully begins: According to a recent Pew Research Center survey, Americans increasingly get their news from multiple sources. More than one-third use Internet-based sources such as Web ...
Restaurant Bulemia (1)
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EclectEcon (52)
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EclectEcon (52)
2 days, 8 hours
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From the Trono Globe and Mail's Report on Business (note the headline): After the binge, the purge For the past five years, the U.S. restaurant industry has been on an expansion tear. Now, high fuel prices, a shaky economy and rising food inflation are keeping customers at home, sending four major chains running for bankruptcy protection so far this yearUnfortunately, the article names only one of the chains. Further, it doesn't tell how many chains ...
Income Based Affirmative Action (1)
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Mark Thoma (78)
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Economist's View (79)
2 days, 10 hours
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Robert Reich says it's time to link affirmative action programs to family income: Robert Reich, Marketplace: Here's an idea Democrats probably won't endorse but should: Affirmative action based on family income. The latest data from the Census tell us that inequality keeps growing. ... At the same time, it's become harder for lower-income people to move upward. With wider inequality, the distance poor kids -- whatever their color -- has to climb to reach the ...
New poverty numbers (1)
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Owen (32)
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Owen abroad (6)
2 days, 11 hours
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The World Bank published new estimates of the number of people in poverty yesterday. They are very important and they’ve been universally misreported. The estimates show: the developing world is poorer than we thought; there are 1.4 billion people living in poverty (about one quarter of the developing world), not 985 million as we previously thought nonetheless, progress in reducing poverty has been about as fast as previously believed - poverty has been declining at ...
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angol said:
I have to get organized with my sched and start doing stuff like this for local news etc.
Larry Summers lays it out for the next President (1)
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escabeche (2)
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MetaFilter (1190)
2 days, 20 hours
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"There are half a dozen [economic] issues today, each one of which is as important as the most important issue at the beginning of most presidential terms." Larry Summers became so well-known during his brief and contentious tenure as President of Harvard that it's easy to forget about his real job, as a much-lauded academic economist with a history of real-world service at the World Bank and in the Clinton Administration. In this month's Harvard ...
An Economic Haiku Contest (4)
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Steven D. Levitt (170)
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Freakonomics (927)
2 days, 21 hours
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I was reading a bedtime story to my daughter Sophie when I stumbled upon the following haiku by Jack Prelutsky, told from the perspective of a mouse: If not for the cat, And the scarcity of cheese, I could be content. Perhaps I am just a sucker for the word scarcity, but there was something in this haiku that [...]
SocialU: It's All About You, If You're A Virtually Materialistic Narcissist (1)
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Stowe Boyd (127)
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/Message (299)
2 days, 21 hours
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SocialU is a new lifestreamingish social application, that goes to enormous lengths to create a cheesy social environment centered on fungible social gestures, like giving a contact an electronic package of french fries. To 'buy' the fries, users can apply their initial stake of $500,000 social dollars or earn more cash by doing various social things: adding friends, making comments, etc. socialu - it's all about you v0.0.3287, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd. I am ...
Ten Myths in America (1)
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kmg4 (12)
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The Futurist (14)
2 days, 22 hours
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I feel compelled to dispel ten myths that I see as pervasively present in American society. These are beliefs that are repeated so often, and with so little opposition, that they are taken as fact. However, they fail to stand up to mathematical analysis, logical reasoning, or both. These combined myths have cost the US economy trillions of dollars in direct and indirect losses. In no particular order, let me evoke John Stossel and proceed ...
Negative Equity and the U.S. Political Map (1)
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Ironman (6)
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Political Calculations (6)
2 days, 22 hours
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Sound Politics' Jim Miller found a pretty interesting correlation in the incidence of where homeowners have the greatest amount of negative equity and the predominant political affiliations in those areas. We thought it might be fun to show those maps together in the same post! The first map, showing the percentage of homeowners with negative equity in April-June 2008 for U.S. metropolitan statistical areas, was created by Hannah Fairfield of the New York Times as ...
EVE Online Industrialists will get their expansion too! (1)
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CrazyKinux@gmail.com (CrazyKinux) (2)
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CrazyKinux's Musing (2)
3 days, 11 hours
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I've been saying it for so long I can't remember when I first brought it up. Well, it seems that CCP were either listening to what I was saying (very unlikely) or they were already working on this very issue (much more likely).As reported by EVE Network News, and mentioned to me by two reliable sources, CCP will release a new expansion, codename MIDAS, that will see Industrialist finally get the attention they deserve and ...
Jim Hamilton of UCSD Is Very Clever (1)
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Brad DeLong (100)
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Grasping Reality with Both Hands: The Semi-Daily Journal Economist Brad DeLong (96)
3 days, 12 hours
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The clever Jim Hamilton presents us with the U.S. unemployment rate: And with a "simulated" unemployment rate produced from a model obtained by fitting an AR(2) model with fat-tailed Student-T innovations to the unemployment rate series: Jim writes: These simulated data have the same mean, variance, and serial correlation as the real data.... Even so, one has little of the sense of a recurrent cycle in these simulated data that seemed compelling in the actual ...
New Census Data on Poverty, Income, and Health Insurance (1)
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Mark Thoma (78)
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Economist's View (79)
3 days, 17 hours
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Here's a round up or reactions to the Poverty, Income, and health Insurance Report released today by the Census Bureau: Statement by Robert Greenstein on the New New Census Bureau Data on Poverty, Income, and Health Insurance, CBPP: ...[T]he new Census data are disquieting. Though 2007 was the sixth (and likely the final) year of an economic expansion, poverty was significantly higher, the median income of non-elderly households significantly lower, and the number and percentage ...
Very good sentences (1)
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Tyler Cowen (899)
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Marginal Revolution (1169)
3 days, 21 hours
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The first lesson in economics is: things are often not what they seem.That's a sentence in the first edition of Samuelson's Principles. Justin Wolfers discusses the book here. Part of chapter one is on-line here. Use the search function. Here (search for "communism") Samuelson says that economics cannot pass judgment on whether American society will go the "revolutionary" path (toward communism) or the "evolutionary" path, or whether Russia indicates the "folly" or the "wisdom" of ...
Metronomics (1)
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Ryan (1323)
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The Bellows (15)
3 days, 22 hours
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The Obamanomics piece is kind of sprawling, and I’m not particularly pleased with it, so let’s distill. I had lots of thoughts about the piece, but let me just go with one of them. Our goals (we being Obama, you and I, America, etc.): - Sound economic growth, i.e. not based on temporary speculative bubbles - Broad-based economic growth, with benefits that accrue up and down the income spectrum - Efficiency, such that our vulnerability ...
Iraq for Sale (1)
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Jon Taplin (99)
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Jon Taplin's Blog (97)
3 days, 22 hours
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The U.S. wants a relatively loose agreement that allows us to keep troops in Iraq. But the prime minister is under intense political pressure to take a hard line against the Americans, even as his government engages in the back-and-forth of negotiations. Graffiti can be seen on the walls in Shiite districts of Baghdad saying, “Iraq for sale: See Maliki.” To further prove his independance, Malaki is getting ready to sign a big oil deal ...
Is the US going to default on its debt? (3)
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mutant (12)
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MetaFilter (1190)
3 days, 22 hours
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Even as I.O.U.S.A, a documentary looking at the United States' $53T national debt, is to be shown at both the Democratic and Republican conventions, economists are beginning to openly discuss the previously unthinkable - should America should default on some or perhaps all it's obligations? Although some argue a sovereign default by the United States would not be the end of the world, with political fallout more severe than financial, most overlook the obvious: America ...
