Assorted links

1. The growing importance of mall kiosks.

2. MIE: ugly Christmas sweaters.

3. David Warsh on all the recent hullaballoo.

4. Will the Chinese experiment with full convertibility into the New Zealand dollar?

5. Noted law professor leaves academic to do acupuncture, and profile of David Graeber and his anarchism.

6. A note on self-defeating austerity.  I say if you engage in “austerity” today and your fiscal situation responds fine in the short run, the austerity was probably, fiscally speaking, an OK thing to do.  If you have some festering problems seventeen years from now, I would consider blaming the decisions, or lack of decisions, which get made in the interim.  If anything the utter OKness of the short run effects means a government has slack to deal with the longer run; this is an ongoing decision tree.  By relying so heavily on an difficult to observe, difficult to causally trace yet somehow carved in stone long run, this argument is looking more and more like the old Laffer Curve.