He forgot about Hawtrey
Ezra reports, from his commentator Nylund:
Is it just me or do famous economists seem to live a really long time?
Friedman (94)
Mises (92)
John Kenneth Galbraith (98)
Hayek (92)
Leontief (93)
…besides Keynes (or any of the really old school guys like
Ricardo and Say), its rare to find a major economist that didn't make
it well into their 80's.
Samuelson is in his 90s and Ken Arrow is 87. Buchanan, Tullock, Coase, and Vernon Smith are all still with us and I wonder if Gary Becker might prove immortal. Frank Ramsey is one obvious exception, as is Miguel Sidrauski. Fischer Black and Amos Tversky are two more recent exceptions. Here is a paper on 16 notable economists who died prematurely.
Markets in everything
Deron Bauman reports to me:
Information Age Prayer is
a site that charges you a monthly fee to say prayers for you. A typical
charge is $4.95 per month to say three prayers specified by you each
day.
"We use state of the art text to speech synthesizers to voice each
prayer at a volume and speed equivalent to typical person praying," the
company states. "Each prayer is voiced individually, with the name of
the subscriber displayed on screen.
"Prices, however, are dictated by the length of the prayer. As noted
in the Information Age Prayer FAQ, "A discounted prayer will cost less
than other prayers of similar length."
Here is the full story.
8-minute video
Of me, at the Kaufmann Foundation, talking about blogging (and I believe some other things). Like Scott Sumner, I don't usually watch myself on video so I haven't viewed it. I don't remember what I said, but I am sure I meant it at the time. The Kaufmann people seemed to like it.
I thank Tim Kane for the pointer. From Tim's blog, here is an interesting profile of Carl Schramm, president of Kaufmann. I did have a chance to meet Carl and he is a fascinating man.
Assorted links
1. Transcript of Bob Lucas talk, with eminent questioners and, at one point, Bob Lucas falling down the stairs.
2. Bloggingheads.TV between Mark Thoma and Scott Sumner.
3. What Larry Summers learned at a hedge fund.
4. Lesswrong, a rationality blog, with guest posts by Robin Hanson.
5. Markets in everything: a pro al Qaeda magazine, from North Carolina, in English.
Trends to ponder
As I've mentioned before
sex preferences can change, Japan shifted from sons to daughters around
1990, while South Korea has flipped more recently. In the United States
heterosexual couples prefer to adopt daughters.
Here is more.
Gaming the Geithner plan, part II
From a recent Business Week article, here are some suggested possibilities:
Banks may be able to finance the sale of their own troubled loans, lending money to the public-private partnerships that buy the assets. A bank's loan to the partnership would be buttressed by an FDIC guarantee. Administration officials confirm that the Treasury may allow such seller financing. The move essentially replaces junky mortgages on the bank's books with an FDIC-guaranteed loan.
…Say a private investor in one of the partnerships owns big stockholdings in a bank putting assets out to auction. By overbidding for the bank's sludge loans, the investor could help drive up the banks' shares and make a tidy profit.
…Perhaps the most intricate maneuvers will likely stem from "layering" the government's many programs of the last six months. Starting with some of the capital infusion received last fall from the Treasury, a bank could invest in a private partnership that buys toxic assets using a loan guaranteed by the FDIC. Those assets could then be chopped up and sold as securities to other investors–who put together the financing for the deal by availing themselves of another program of low-risk loans from the Federal Reserve. Thus the original bank's capital at risk in this web of deals would be almost nil. "[This] is going right back to the practices that got us into this problem–except using government leverage," Young says. "It might lead to an even wilder party than we saw before."
You should not assume that all of these strategies will be legally possible or that they necessarily work. Furthermore the greater danger may be that banks are afraid to make money in a partnership with government aid, for political reasons. Still, if you are seeking to think through possible problems in the Geithner plan, the article is a one good place to start.
Ricardo Caballero's defense of the Geithner plan is here.
Addendum: Jeff Sachs is worried.
Economists and Societies
That's by Marion Fourcade and the subtitle is Discipline and Profession in the United States, Britain & France, 1890s to 1990s.
I very much liked this book and I might call it one of my favorite history of economic thought books, period. It skips textual exegesis and looks at what the economics profession actually did — in the comparative sense — in the United States, England, and France.
On France, I liked the data on p.6. Circa 1981, only 52 percent of French economists thought that rent control reduced the quantity and quality of the housing stock. Only 49 percent of French economists thought that flexible exchange rates were "effective," compared to 94 percent in the United States and 92 percent in West Germany. Remember Alex's blog posts on this topic, here and here?
The extent of hierarchy in the profession in England shocked even me:
Joan Robinson, for instance, did not become a professor until the ripe age of sixty-two. And such a well-respected economist as Roy Harrod never rose higher than a readership at Nuffield College.
Definitely recommended. Here is the book's home page.
Assorted links
1. Markets in everything: Anatomie-Bettwäsche.
2. Zach Wamp.
3. Vitamin sales seem to be countercyclical.
4. I Love You, Man is a deeply conceptual movie, full of (implicit) social science. It raises (and does not resolve in the usual corny way) the possibility that our choices of romantic partners are more interchangeable than our choices of same-sex friends.
Why creditors should suffer, too
That is my latest column and the core point is straightforward:
What the banking system needs is creditors who monitor risk and cut
their exposure when that risk is too high. Unlike regulators, creditors
and counterparties know the details of a deal and have their own money
on the line.
But in both the bailouts and in the new proposals, the government is
effectively neutralizing creditors as a force for financial safety.
This suggests a scary possibility — that the next regulatory regime
could end up even worse than the last.
Do read the column for a discussion of how we might make creditors suffer. Here is why the Obama administration is having such a tough time with the issue:
Right now, people cannot understand why A.I.G. received bailout
money, so they feel deceived. A single insurance company, even a very
large one, just does not seem that essential to the American economy,
which makes the company all the more a scapegoat. Much went awry at
A.I.G., but in the context of a bailout, the company should be thought
of as the conduit for helping an entire market that went bust.
This poses a very difficult public relations problem for the government, because the Federal Reserve and the Treasury do not want to discuss the importance of the creditors too publicly right now.
Why not? It would be bad precedent, and mind-bogglingly expensive, to
promise to pick up all future obligations to major creditors. At the
same time, any remarks that threaten to leave creditors hanging could
panic the markets. So silence reigns, the Fed and Mr. Geithner receive
bad publicity over the bailouts, and we are all laying the groundwork
for a future financial crisis.
James Kwak offers comment. Here is Arnold Kling. Mark Thoma has very good comments on time consistency problems.
Harvey Mansfield on economists
Kent Guida sent me this very interesting article; here are a few bits:
The economists I know are generally, as individuals, sober and
cautious, the most respectable of all professors and in their honesty
and reliability representing the best in bourgeois virtue. But when
they get together as economists, they give way to boyish irrational
exuberance over the accomplishments and prospects of economics as a
science.
…Overconfidence in overcoming chance is the way of life recommended by
economists. It is the way of life known as progress by liberals and as
growth by conservatives, who are secretly united by overconfidence in
their knowledge of the future which they describe diversely and call by
different names.
…Now, the main consequence of living the over-confident life is to
believe that virtue is not necessary. Perhaps this is the main cause as
well as consequence of that life. Virtue is a chancy quality because
you may not have it or live up to it. It seems less reliable than
self-interest with its allies, fear and greed. Everybody has
self-interest, which is not true of virtue. But at least virtue does
not depend on predicting the future. On the contrary, virtue is a
resource for everyone when bad times come–something to fall back on,
to give cheer, to restore. On top of that, virtue will save you from
being corrupted by good fortune as well. This is the great truth taught
by the Stoics.
Assorted links
1. Posner reviews Akerlof and Shiller.
2. Review essay on macroeconometrics.
3. La Sirene: I can't wait to go see it.
4. The economics of URL shortening.
5. After Gaza, by Michael Walzer. He understands nested games, at least implicitly.
New Deal Revisionism
The NYTimes has a short piece in the arts section on "new deal revisionism." Rich Vedder gets the best line:
Mr. Vedder playfully offered another analogy: the recession of 1920. Why was that slump, over and done with by 1922, so much shorter than the following decade’s? Well, for starters, he said, President Woodrow Wilson suffered an incapacitating stroke at the end of 1919, while his successor, Warren G. Harding, universally considered one of the worst presidents in American history, preferred drinking, playing poker and golf, and womanizing, to governing. “So nothing happened,” Mr. Vedder said.
Of course Mr. Vedder does not wish ill health – or obliviousness – on any chief executive. Still, in his view, when you’re talking about government intervention in the economy, doing nothing is about the best you can hope for from any president.
By the way, I am looking forward to hearing Bob Higgs on C-Span this weekend. Higgs is a top-rate economic historian from whom I learn something new everytime I hear him.
Advertising markets in everything
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service each bringing you a contribution cost. Please note that in
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of 50 mourners, this ensures we will get the exposure required to cover
the cost of the sponsorship.
All our sponsorship opportunities
are designed to be non intrusive to the proceedings. We can tailor the
list of options to your requirements giving you complete control of the
service. You will have a dedicated funeral assistant at Laptops Direct
who can help with any queries you may have.
The clincher is the list of price quotations, in British pounds, find it here. I thank Erik Walz for the pointer.
Addendum: It turns out this isn't true! A fraudulent report.
A new and amazing plan for economic stimulus
Indeed, and I am not being sarcastic.
Of course there are many illegal markets that would generate stimulus were they to be legalized. Here are some of the big ones.
- Drugs
- Guns
- Prostitution (except in Nevada)
- Gay prostitution (even in Nevada)
- Gambling
- Trade with Cuba
- Liberalized immigration
I can assure you that today Delta stimulated the book trade. Thank you all for the comments, I am genuinely pleased that I have all of you to complain to. It is a real pleasure.
The Prisoner
Delta Airlines, almost six hours. they won’t leave, they won’t let me off.