Category: Web/Tech

1. What consumers do in a downturn: surging vs. dwelling

2. CIA coups and insider trading

3. When do people root for the underdog?

4. Maybe asking people to vote doesn’t increase turnout (via Kottke)

5. Graph for commercial paper outstanding

1. Yale course on game theory, on-line

2. New blog on Austrian economics

3. Stunning pictures of slime mold

4. What happens at age 10?

5. New blog (?) about derivatives

1. Jeff Hummel blames Bernanke and Paulson for what has happened.  I don’t agree but we are committed to passing along many different points of view.

2. My favorite Greg Mankiw column so far.

3. Dividends vs. share repurchases: an excellent post.

4. New blog on cognition and culture, via Razib.

Here is a good piece rebutting the Minneapolis Fed study.  One point made is this:

…there is the inconvenient matter that the Federal Reserve and
the Treasury went out and did all that stuff they did in order to prevent a
massive breakdown in lending to the real economy. … Now this does
allow sceptics to say, "Well, how do we know things would have collapsed"? We
don’t, of course, but that doesn’t change the fact that current lending takes
into account massive government intervention to make sure that lending
continued. The latter therefore can’t be used to argue that the former wasn’t
necessary.

On these questions I am more of a pessimist than is Alex.

1. Reused and recycled women

2. Life under extreme scarcity

3. How to scare a kid

4. I enjoyed this sentence: "Lady, I know I’m in jeans and you’re all throwing that scarf around over your suit, but two years of blogging has left me pretty confident that my thought is rigorous."

From The Brokers With Hands on Their Faces blog.  Where else?

Hat tip to Boing Boing.

1. Price Fishback on New Deal mortgage aid

2. Using the placebo effect for health care policy

3. Finger-tapping speed peaks at age 39 for men

4. Markets in everything: betting on Turing machines

Find it here.  One of my favorite moments of the London trip was when Alex, in a luncheon full of highly intelligent British people, referred to "the wisdom of crowds."  There was a brief moment of silence.  Then one such Brit cleared his throat and corrected him to the notion of "wisdom *for* crowds"…

1. Why Scottish independence might never happen: the bailout for the Royal Bank of Scotland

2. Why Canada has largely avoided a financial crisis

3. The scariest hour on Wall Street

1. The puzzle of the missing heroin

2. Falling real estate prices in China

3. Nouriel Roubini’s apartment

4. Google Trends: FDIC

5. Christopher Buckley gets fatwahed

Telepathy has always been a sign of kookiness but synthetic telepathy heh that’s just around the corner.

The U.S. Army is developing a technology known as synthetic telepathy that would
allow someone to create email or voice mail and send it by thought alone. The
concept is based on reading electrical activity in the brain using an
electroencephalograph, or EEG…

The idea of communicating by thought alone is not a new
one. In the 1960s, a researcher strapped an EEG to his head and, with some
training, could stop and start his brain’s alpha waves to compose Morse code
messages.

Here is a previous post in the series.

Here is a list from The Times of London.  I would add Felix Salmon, Paul Krugman, Arnold Kling, calculatedrisk, Dealbreaker, Brad DeLong, Naked Capitalist, and others.

I thank Mark Brady for the pointer.

1. Filipino food is better than you think.

2. Real life mast tying from Google.

3. Betting market on the economics Nobel Prize.

4. Markets in everything: a lego doppelganger of your beloved.  Only $60K.

5. What is an economist worth?

6. Heroes of capitalism, a new blog.

I thank a variety of MR readers for the pointers.

1. The ten highest earning authors; I like only one of them.

2. Chris Blattman and Michael Clemens on the long run.

3.The worst academic jobs around the world?

4. The difference between country music and rap music

5. Is there a need for "speed bankruptcy"? — an analysis of the major plans

1. What could $700 billion buy in the developing world?

2. Nobel predictions, via Greg Mankiw

3. The crisis in pictures, via Chris F. Masse

4. Critique of Hubbard and Mayer