Bid for meals at your favorite restaurants.

That is in Scotland, here is an article about the service.

The pointer is from Mark Steckbeck.

Brad DeLong and Greg Mankiw offer insightful comments on Friedman and Keynes.  On macroeconomics, what does the difference boil down to?  I can think of a few possibilities:

1. Keynes thought a horizontal LM curve ("the liquidity trap") was possible, but Friedman did not.  This was Friedman’s own view, at least as expressed in Milton Friedman’s Monetary Framework.  Without a horizontal LM curve, monetary policy can always pull the economy out of a downturn.

2. Keynes emphasized volatile flows, Friedman emphasized stocks of wealth; a stocks view should imply greater macro stability.

3. Keynes challenged the assumption of gross substitutability, and therefore thought that price and wage flexibility could lead to a downward spiral of falling prices and incomes.  Wage and price stickiness was not so much an assumption for him as a policy recommendation.  Friedman viewed stickiness as a necessary evil, stemming from the general imperfection of the world.

4. Friedman thought that the liquidity premium on money was unlikely to keep interest "too high"; for Friedman the interest rate is determined solely in the loanable funds market by time preference and productivity, a’la Irving Fisher.

5. For Keynes the demand for investment was inherently unstable, for "beauty contest" reasons.  Friedman viewed expectations as "adaptive," and tracking the world with a lag, rather than tracking the expectations of other people.

6. Friedman simply had more faith in the self-adjusting nature of the market, and #1-#5, and other possibilities, were mere epiphenomena of this broader philosophical difference.

Pet ashes become art.

Here is my Wall Street Journal review of Clair Brown, John Haltiwanger, and Julia Lane, Economic Turbulence: Is a Volatile Economy Good for America?  Excerpt:

In short, America is not becoming
a nation of part-time Wal-Mart cashiers or burger flippers.  In four of
the five sectors studied by the authors–semiconductors, software,
financial services, retail food and trucking–the growth rate for
full-time jobs exceeds the growth rate for jobs in general.  (Retail
food is the exception.)  Separate research, conducted by Ann Huff
Stevens at the University of California, Davis, shows that the average
tenure for employed U.S. male laborers has been broadly stable over the
past 35 years.

Insofar as individuals move to
lower-paying jobs, the turnover of firms is not the driving cause.  The
most original proposition in "Economic Turbulence" is the claim that a
big part of measured wage declines derives from job downgrades within
firms–sticking with the same employer but moving from, say, mid-level
manager to gopher. 

Here is my New York Times column; the topic is familiar but the slant is new: I consider the problematic incentives for Mexican education.  Here is the beginning of the problem:

A high school diploma brings higher wages in Mexico,
but in the United States the more educated migrants do not earn
noticeably more than those who have less education. Education does not
much raise the productivity of hard physical labor. The result is that
the least educated Mexicans have the most reason to cross the border.
In addition, many Mexicans, knowing they may someday go to the United
States, see less reason to invest in education.

Here is another commonly neglected point:

Unfortunately, we cannot expect a wealthier Mexico to resolve migration
problems, at least not within the short- or even medium-run. The
evidence suggests that good times in Mexico give the poor the means to
leave, while keeping the better-educated males at home in good jobs.