1. Richard Clarida on monetary and fiscal policy, circa 2009.
2. Britain is more Germanic than it thinks, at least since 407 A.D.
3. Erica Grieder on Rick Perry.
4. Good post, but it means a normal-sloping AD curve and two normal blades to the scissors.
5. How the ruble zone collapsed (pdf), very good study, cash shortages along the way.
Wow, that is the most honest I have seen Krugman treat Mulligan. He actually tried to address the arguments instead of asserting his idiocy and making political arguments. Not that I think Mulligan is completely right, but he’s been showing that supply is still generating big swings. I wish Krugman had addressed the newer points Mulligan has made with respect to the low unemployment in the 55+ population, rather than dismissing his other points with a just-so explanation and then assuming it holds for all of Mulligan’s other arguments.
“I think his stonewalling on the Cameron Todd Willingham execution has been horrible, but given widespread national support for the death penalty, most Americans won’t see it that way.”
Let’s be a little clearer on this. He signed off on the execution of an innocent man, and consciously ignored evidence of the man’s innocence. This is murder. Rick Perry is a murderer.
Most Americans don’t want to execute innocent people, regardless of support for the death penalty. Maybe the difference between executing guilty and innocent people is too nuanced for American political discourse, but then the problem is the discourse.
Agreed.
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/09/07/090907fa_fact_grann?currentPage=all
“In a scathing report, he concluded that investigators in the Willingham case had no scientific basis for claiming that the fire was arson, ignored evidence that contradicted their theory, had no comprehension of flashover and fire dynamics, relied on discredited folklore, and failed to eliminate potential accidental or alternative causes of the fire. He said that Vasquez’s approach seemed to deny “rational reasoning” and was more “characteristic of mystics or psychics.” What’s more, Beyler determined that the investigation violated, as he put it to me, “not only the standards of today but even of the time period.””
Hope you have already done your homework so you can share your supporting evidence with MR readers. Otherwise, please read these two entries and ALL their references
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cameron_Todd_Willingham
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Cameron_Todd_Willingham
and then explain exactly how they support your clear-cut conclusions.
I admit I’m less clear-cut now. The arson investigation seems to have been thoroughly discredited by multiple sources, but some of the other evidence against him is stronger than The New Yorker bothered to mention. I guess I fell for the liberal propaganda. No wonder I don’t usually follow crime stories.
One good thing about the internet is that there’s always somebody around to tell you you’re wrong.
And it’s usually E. Barandiaran.
One reason I hate the death penalty is that it focuses a lot of our limited attention span on individuals least deserving of it.
If Rick Perry is a murderer, then what was his motive? Even if you assume the worst about Perry’s character, he would have nothing to gain (and a lot to lose) from intentionally allowing an innocent man to be executed.
It is much more logical to assume that he actually believed Willingham to be guilty. As the comments below show, Willingham’s innocence is far from clear today. It was even less clear in 2004.
I think there is plenty of room to criticize Perry on this issue, but making absurd charges won’t help you convince anyone. Your last sentence is really silly, too.
Sorry, I meant “comments above”.
…then what was his motive?
Just a suggestion: To save his face. Maybe he just hated admitting that he was wrong. Quite a lot of high-ranking politicians and other bosses would rather die than acknowledge an error.
2. Are the English really defensive at all about having angle or saxon ancestry? Really?
Some of them, yes. A few years ago John Derbyshire, of National Review, positively crowed about a genetic study of mitrochrondrial DNA suggesting that the British population had not changed much, genetically, since the Neolithic era. (He misunderstood the study; mitrochrondrial DNA is passed down through the maternal line only, so what the study suggested is that the female line is of great ancientry in Britain, but that implies nothing about the male line, and conquerors are famous everywhere for killing the men and taking the vanquished women for their own.)
In many old nations you can find a romantic notion that “Our people are unique, not related to anyone else”– something we in the US and Canada obviously know better. In its most malefic form this undelay much of Nazi racial propaganda. To this day in Japan genetic and linguistic evidence showing that the non-aboriginal people of the islands came from Korea is seriously downplayed. There are people in India who reject the evidence that their Aryan ancestors came from Central Asia. 19th century British folk played with the silly theory that they were the decendants of the Lost Tribes of Israel.
Many white Americans claim to have native American ancestry, while most of them probably have none. People dislike being thought of as invaders and not natives.
Claiming native American ancestry has only become trendy in last couple of generations (and in some places is still not a status plus marker). For a long time “half breeds” were treated as inferiors, almost as much so as people of mixed black-white ancestry. My great grandmother was such a person, and the only man who would marry her was the town drunk (a recent immigrant) whose abuse put her in an early grave. Both her daughters had to move out of town to achieve any respectability, and as late as the 1930s my maternal cousin (once removed) was being admonished by the elders in her father’s family not to act like the “wild Indian” who had been her grandfather,
Interestingly, in the 19th century, some Maori, on being converted to Christianity, decided that they were the Lost Tribes of Israel.
As you say I don’t think the English (frequently known as Anglos or Anglo-saxons afterall), are at all defensive about this. In fact I was taught at school (in England) that England was settled by Anglo-Saxons after the Romans left, in almost exactly the way described in the article. I don’t think the attitude of some rustics from 1919 quoted in the article really are a very good choice to show off what the English believed.
But definitely the guy who wrote that article has a bit of a persecution complex, one quote: “the nation which most dislikes the Germans were once Krauts themselves”. Actually I don’t think the English really hate the Germans, that would be the Dutch, Poles, or the Danish (or possibly Norwegians), that endured the German occupation during the 2nd world war. The English admire a lot of the German culture, the industrial manufacturing especially, which the English romanticize in the same way that second generation city dwellers romanticize agricultural life. The rival nation for the English is France, in the long thousand year war against the French the Germans have more often been allies for the English than their enemy.
Another quote that made we chuckle: ” The fear of a violent conquest of their country is deeply engrained in the English psyche.” I mean, what a strange thing to be afraid of.
2. Underweights the Danes
Assume cheap housing…
3. After an executive order mandating HPV vaccine, all you have to wonder is whether his alternative is worse. Unfortunately that is the harder question.
Of course there is also Perry openly and approvingly considering treason ala 1861.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DzbdugWJbNo&feature=fvst
Need I say his his history is wrong here? Texas was never given the right to leave the Union at its choice.
So this guy is in favor of executing innocent people and treason. What’s not to like?
I have just stopped reading a terrible column; I couldn’t finish it. In her NYT column, today Christina Romer is in a mission to show the world that “we have the tools to deal with our problems, if only policy makers will use them.”
Leaving aside questions about where she has been the past three years, her starting argument is that you idiots don’t know what happened in the 1930s. She claims to know: Hitler prompted a huge capital flight from Germany and the U.S. got part (most?) of it, so Ms. Romer claims that “The result was an aggressive monetary expansion that effectively ended deflation”. In modern jargon, she claims that Roosevelt didn’t neutralize (or sterilize) the monetary effects of the capital inflow and therefore Roosevelt has to be credited with an aggressive monetary expansion. Assuming that she is right about a large capital flight from Germany to the U.S., I’d like her to explain how Roosevelt could have prevented such inflow of capital to have important economic consequences. From both theory and history, I know that none could have prevented them. Indeed, there is no need to tell a fraudulent clown to do nothing when God sends manna.
FDR, thanks for not being Hitler! It’s a shame she never held a position of influence.
Incidentally, capital flight from the US is one thing I’m concerned about.
Related question, do academics just have a hard time being bureaucrats?
For a long time capital has been flowing out of the US, both to be invested in bricks and machines and to make a quick gain by taking advantage of the stupid/erratic policies of national governments everywhere. At the same time, however, a lot of capital has been flowing into the US, both to be invested in bricks and machines (and ideas) and to be protected in safe assets. You’re lucky because despite the downgrade, safety is relative and the alternatives to Treasury bills and bonds have declined at least as much as T-bills and bonds. So far there has been no “sudden” reversal of flows out of or into the U.S., but their probability may have been increasing. When it happens, it’ll be a shock –yes, “Bill Cosby” economists will be saying “I told you so”.
In relation to your question about academics (people that have been in the tower at least 10 years after getting their Ph.Ds). The answer is yes. I’d say that 90% fail to adjust to work in bureaucracies, although only 50% go back to the tower. Even those that adjust do not perform better than economists that have been practitioners after graduate school. Even in large bureaucracies with research departments (say, the IMF), many good researchers have a hard time being good advisers and most fail to become good executives (they cannot negotiate collective decisions and implement them). We are talking about very different jobs. Let me say it this way: if I had to take a high b/c decision, I’d hire an academic economist only to check my thinking when I’m ready to take the decision and I’d ask him/her just one question (what I’m failing to take into account?) and give him/her a tight deadline.
Too bad Tyler didn’t post this link from one of his colleagues to be at GMU (I think Pearlstein moves over this fall, retiring from the WaPo. Essential Reading: http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/steven-pearlstein-blame-for-financial-mess-starts-with-the-corporate-lobby/2011/08/08/gIQA3zMlDJ_story.html really good scolding of the CEOs who have stood silently by as we have descended into chaos!
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