Dairy Beats Meat
An interesting fact in Cochran and Hapending's 10,000 Year Explosion , is that raising cattle for milk, as opposed to meat, generates 5 ...
Inconsistent Blurbers
As a separate issue, I noted Bhide's book has a blurb by uber -blurber Lawrence Summers: Bhidé provides a fresh and reassuring perspec...
Bhide's Entrepreneurs
A neat book by Amar Bhide called The Venturesome Economy is about innovation quite different than that of the classic view given by Joseph...
Geithner's Stress Test Revealed
The crack team at the Treasury, headed by veteran enterprise-wide capital allocations specialist Tim Geithner, revealed their stress test . ...
Increasing Unemployment Insurance is also a Bad Idea
In various debates, the FreeMarketer eventually faces the question "If you don't like Obama's plan, what are you going to do?...
Don't Blame The Quants, Felix
It would be nice to think that this crisis was a huge math error. Some geek in a cubicle hit the wrong button on his HP12-C. Doh! Alas, i...
Statistical Errors Play into Popular Demand
From A case for Due Diligence in Policy Formation: In 1993, a team of researchers led by D.W. Dockery and C.A. Pope published a study in he...
Stress Testing Now is a Really Bad Idea
Last week the market stumbled, especially financials. I think a lot of that was because people are afraid of Geithner's potential stres...
Vaclav Klaus Rules!
At a meeting with European Parliament, Czech president Vaclav Klaus made the following observation: Klaus said that the economic downturns a...
How to Boil a Frog
Phil Gramm, on the mortgage crisis , in today's WSJ: Countrywide Financial Corp. cloaked itself in righteousness and silenced any troubl...
Don't Panic, Inflation will Save Us
It is strange how many people I have heard say: "we should inflate as much as possible, worry about it later". Remember the poor ...
It's not all bad
Shark attacks at 5 year lows! They say the weak economy is partially to 'blame'.
The Problem of Make-Work
Many eminent economists and most legislators think that a dollar spent creates jobs, creates wealth. But, 'creating jobs' is easy, ...
How Helping 'Homeowners' Makes Things Worse
Obama announced a new plan to help renters (oops, 'homeowners') who cannot afford their mortgages. There are two types of people w...
Geithner's Plan
Geithner unveiled a vague plan to address the crisis, and it's a what they call in Washington, a crap sandwich. "First, we're...
Banks Insolvency is not about Stress Tests
Over at Marginal Revolutions, Alex Tabarrok notes that " Many of the major banks are insolvent", and links to NYTimes article her...
Crisis and Legislation
Rahm Emannuel recently stated that "You never want a serious crisis to go to waste." See here . This is not merely a left wing ta...
Industry Growth not Necessarily Industry Profits
In a Farewell to Alms , Gregory Clark's fascinating new account of the Industrial Revolution in England, he notes that profitability doe...
Trader Book Gets Taken by Fraud
Millionaire Traders is a book in the tradition of Jack Schwager's Market Wizards, except instead of using famous traders, it uses '...
Taleb and Kahneman in Germany
see video here . A couple quick comments. Taleb noted that he would not speak to the US based Chartered Financial Analyst meeting unless th...
Being Correct and Being Clear
Louisa Gilder, daughter of George Gilder, recently wrote a book on quantum spookiness. This is fun stuff. Anyway, in her diavlogue with Geo...
Great Insight on Talking about the Future
From the NYT on how an official can avoid looking stupid: Walter Heller, who went from the campus of the University of Minnesota to become c...
Barro on Krugman
in today's WSJ : Atlantic: Oh, well he wrote a series of posts saying he thought the World War II spending evidence was not good, for a ...
Federal Stimulus
Gary Becker and Casey Mulligan have a good post on the 'stimulus' package in today's WSJ: The evidence of past expansions of gov...
Darwin's Birthday and Evolution's Quagmire
It's Darwin's 200th birthday February 12, in the sesquicentenial of the publication of his Origin of Species: By Means of Natural Se...
Keynesianism in Practice
Keynesian vs. Supply Siders can be a purely technical debate about substitution effects from issuing government debt, or multiplier estimate...
Edits on Book
I got back edits on my book , and some of the comments are pretty interesting. Clearly, my usage of "that" and "which" ...
Nudge in Practice
Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler wrote Nudge , which argues a seemingly reasonable amount of paternalism can make the world a better place. ...
High Risk, Low Return, Perfectly Consistent
Andrew Ang, Robert Hodrick et al wrote this piece on the Cross-Section of Volatility and Expected Returns . I'm about to get my edits b...
Righteous Bonuses
Obama is rightly upset about the size of bonuses handed out when banks are getting a federal bailout, but not every bonus is undeserved, so ...
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