Find it here, I have yet to read this one but recommended as always.  Here is blogger John Quiggin saying "who cares what you think?", the perennial question for us all.

Several months ago I noted that a virtual world, Eve Online, had hired a real economist.  Here is his first report.  What makes virtual worlds important for economics is that for the first time ever, macro-economists will be able to do experiments.  I predict that we will see some very interesting experiments in the near future.  In the meantime here is an interesting bit from the report – the laws of supply of demand work in many worlds. 

EVE consists of more than 5000 solar systems in 64 regions. The solar
systems are connected in a complex web allowing for goods to be moved
from one end in the Universe to another. Pilots have to be careful
because in low sec and zero-zero security zones there is always the
danger of being attacked by gangs of pirates looking for easy prey….

EVE is so large it is difficult for anyone to grasp what is going on
in all the regions at any given time. Yet the markets seem to be very
efficient at distributing information resulting in symmetric prices
throughout Empire space (and even further). This is clearly visible in
figure 11 which shows the price for zydrine in three different Empire
regions.

Examining these time series in more detail reveals the price
difference between regions is declining over time and price
fluctuations within regions are also decreasing. This can be seen as
evidence for increased efficiency in arbitrage trading over time
resulting in symmetric prices and an overall more efficient market.

Thanks to Ambrose for the pointer.

Addendum: Be sure to check the comments for insightful details from Mike K., solarjetman and others. 

Here is my now-on-Sundays NYT column, on the recent subprime crisis.  Excerpt:

Nonetheless, Fed watchers should resist the tendency to put all
events into a simple or a morally plausible narrative. Monetary policy
is a largely technical subject, and its ups and downs don’t usually fit
into the kinds of emotion-laden stories that human beings apply to
daily life. The “us versus them” tag registers in human memory, but
monetary policy is not always or even usually about moral issues. As
Freud famously noted, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

Financial
market news, which is by nature unpredictable, suffers from distortion
when it is crammed into the form of a simple story. Unlike most
well-structured narratives, the zigs and zags of daily profit and loss
defy simple categorization in terms of moral precepts.

In the case of subprime mortgages, many investors did not foresee
the risk of collateralized debt securities. In response to this crisis,
the Fed has been trying to keep a steady hand and prevent a credit
crunch. We don’t yet know how well the Fed has succeeded, or how well
it could have done in the first place. And the storm has not yet fully
passed.

Of course, such an account of recent financial history
sounds mundane and offers less human conflict. It’s less like the
stories that people have gossiped about for thousands of years and thus
will have less traction, even if it is a better guide to monetary
policy issues.

Here is commentary from Mark Thoma; he believes I should embrace government bail-outs more, without moralizing against them or citing moral hazard so much. 

I might add that this desire to fit everything into a story lies behind recent blogosphere discussions of supply-side economics.  Many Democrats need a story of the following form: "The Republican Party makes decisions in a systematically worse way — much worse way — than do the Democrats."  (Otherwise they might be led to favor restrictions on state power, because Republican rule has not been pretty.)  While I don’t assign p = 0 to this possibility (e.g., Clinton did govern better than Bush has), I think most of the Democratic bloggers give it a far higher p than it deserves, and they retreat into moral strictures to "be more progressive" when faced with contrary evidence.  So a description like "the Republicans have complex motives, not all of which are noble, and end up making lots of mistakes" doesn’t, for them, sound different enough from the Democrats (whom they know) for comfort.

And call me naive, but I also think that Mugabe would not have pursued
his policies for this long if he had a better grasp of debt dynamics. 

That’s Dani Rodrik. 

You all can debate Mugabe if you want, I’m interested in the notion of a self-negating admission.  By writing "…call me naive" Rodrik is showing a level of self-awareness which seems to be signaling he is not naive.  A more direct example of such a construct would be "Call me unwilling to accept outside labels, but…" — the mere act of writing the statement is showing a willingness to accept at least one outside label (namely: unwilling to accept outside labels), which in turn means the writer cannot be unwilling to accept all such labels.

Call me unwilling to use self-negating admissions, but I wonder why writing "Call me naive…" should be more effective than simply writing "I am not naive."  Or for that matter writing "I am naive."  (What is the influence-maximizing claim to make about one’s own naivete?)

Don’t forget Dani Rodrik has a new book coming out: One Economics, Many Recipes.  I don’t agree with all of it, but it is a valuable correction to the hubris of many other writers.

Personal bankruptcies in the United States have increased dramatically,
rising from 1.4 per thousand working age population in 1970 to 8.5 in
2002.  We use a heterogeneous agent life-cycle model with competitive
financial intermediaries who can observe households’ earnings, age and
current asset holdings to evaluate several commonly offered
explanations.  We find that increased uncertainty (income shocks,
expense uncertainty) cannot quantitatively account for the rise in
bankruptcies.  Instead, the rise in filings appears to mainly reflect
changes in the credit market environment.  We find that credit market
innovations which cause a decrease in the transactions cost of lending
and a decline in the cost of bankruptcy can largely accounting for the
rise in consumer bankruptcy.  We also argue that the abolition of usury
laws and other legal changes are unimportant.

Here is the paper.  Here are non-gated versions.