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Showing posts from September, 2012

Marginal Revolution University

Rather touchy-feely for some people from George Mason, don't you think? But I've started their first course and I'm optimistic.

Quote for the Day

Kevin Drum comes at my point from Thursday from a different angle : So far at least, the conservative approach has been....different. Their patron saint going into the last few weeks of the 2012 campaign is Dean Chambers, a blogger who runs a site called UnSkewed Polls. Chambers does not dig deep into the numbers. He doesn't explain sample sizes and cell phone biases. He does just one thing: he reweights all the polls so they have the same proportion of Democrats and Republicans estimated by Rasmussen Reports, a pollster with a longstanding Republican house effect. Then he announces what the numbers are after his reweighting is done. Romney is a big winner every time...  This is, to put it bluntly, nuts. And it suggests a fundamental difference between left and right, one that Chris Mooney wrote about earlier this year in The Republican Brain. Neither side has a monopoly on sloppy number crunching or wishful thinking, but liberals, faced with a reality they didn't like, e

Why GMO Opponents Are Not the Left's Equivalent of Climate Deniers

Matt Yglesias was plugging this Slate piece on Twitter today, " GMO Opponents Are the Climate Skeptics of the Left :" I used to think that nothing rivaled the misinformation spewed by climate change skeptics and spinmeisters. Then I started paying attention to how anti-GMO campaigners have distorted the science on genetically modified foods. You might be surprised at how successful they've been and who has helped them pull it off. I’ve found that fears are stoked by prominent environmental groups , supposed food-safety watchdogs , and influential food columnists ; that dodgy science is laundered by well-respected scholars and propaganda is treated credulously by legendary journalists ; and that progressive media outlets, which often decry the scurrilous rhetoric that warps the climate debate, serve up a comparable agitprop when it comes to GMOs. In short, I’ve learned that the emotionally charged, politicized discourse on GMOs is mired in the kind of fever swamps

New Ebook: The Elephant in the Room

That's the title of our ebook we just put out, available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble . It's made of several articles from the Monthly  back in the Bush years. I formatted and typeset all the articles, which because I got to use the Atavist's tool was pretty easy—way easier than using LaTeX to do the Setwana grammar manual during back in South Africa. I honestly recommend it, as I was putting it together I read the articles several times, and there are some remarkably good ones in there. I particularly recommend "Why Conservatives Can't Govern," by Alan Wolfe, which is towards the end. I learned a lot putting the book together and self-publishing it, but that will have to wait for another post.

Blog Post of the Week

This one comes to you via Noah Smith , who is perhaps my favorite blogger to have discovered this year. Hilarious. In related economics humor: UPDATE: I should also mention that on the YouTube page of the above video, there is that rarest of YouTube events, an apposite and funny comments section. I particularly liked this one .

Game Review: Black Mesa

I missed the original Half-Life when it came out way back in 1998, but I did play through it some years later. Black Mesa is a total conversion of Half-Life 2 back into the original—basically a remake of the original Half-Life with updated graphics and art. It's good. Very well done. It's loyal to the original material, though not afraid to streamline here and there. The Source engine is now, what, eight years old? but it still looks amazingly good. I remember the original game dragged a bit in the middle, with so many endless tunnels and catwalks, and this one feels like it plays a bit more smoothly. The custom soundtrack is a bit loud sometimes, but sounds very professional and mostly appropriate. There is a small disappointment in that the final level is not available yet, but they say it's coming soon. Overall, it's extremely impressive. Most interestingly, this is a totally volunteer production that is available for free (see above link), so long as you have

Modern Monetary Theory

This is a pretty clear and intriguing explanation of modern monetary theory :   More thoughts on it later.

Audiobook Recommendation Bleg

Since I've been walking to and from work a lot recently, and it takes about an hour each way, I've been burning through episodes of This American Life and Radiolab. I'd like to get back into the audiobook zone, but since the reader makes all the difference I'd like to ask the hive mind if there are any particular favorites you've got. Also, if you've got particularly good podcasts (aside from the above), that would be appreciated as well.

What Agency Hath Ben Bernanke?

So, per the new policy announcement from the Fed, there's been a mini-debate on the blogs about how this decision came about. As I've said before, Scott Sumner was perhaps the most important person in the economics blogosphere pushing the idea that the Fed should adopt this new policy, which in turn certainly helped push it out into the media and intellectual mainstream. Thus there has been a round of applause online for Sumner. But Michael Woodford, a big-name economist who wrote a recent paper advocating a Sumnerian policy, isn't sharing credit  in this interview with Dylan Matthews: DM: One big advocate of an NGDP target, on his blog and elsewhere, has been Scott Sumner at Bentley University. Did he influence your thinking on this?  MW: I don’t think it affected me. This theme is one that I had been pushing extensively even before the current crisis, both for reasons that relate to my general views on monetary policy, and the fact that I had been giving talks o

The New Place

Loyal readers have been asking for some pictures of the new place. So here we go: It's a row house in northern DC, east of Rock Creek Park. No idea when it was built, but if I had to guess I'd say the 40s-ish. Here's the living room. Here's an example of what the woodwork looks like. Pretty fancy! And the kitchen. It is quite the relief to have a fire stove with plenty of space. Here's about 60% of the bedroom. Pardon the mess, we're still moving in, but it's big, with a whole separate living room space, a bathroom, two closets, and... ...a sun porch. Not sure what to do with this but it will be awesome. Anyway, it is a huge relief to be out of that damn basement into a place with windows and no grody carpet that turns your feet black no matter how many times you wash it. I can also walk to work, which takes about an hour, perfect for an episode of Radiolab or This American life. Even though my half of the rent is slightly m

Why I Would Be Nervous About Buying a House

Matt Yglesias does a bit of armchair psychoanalysis about why people my age are reluctant to buy a house  despite the fact it can be radically cheaper than renting: In the real world, I doubt we'll see a surge in homeownership. For starters, a lot of people are now locked out of credit markets. But what's more, anecdotally most of the creditworthy renters in their late-twenties or early-thirties who I know are now totally paranoid about buying a place. This is the number one cognitive malady of investors. If prices go up, people hear about lots of people making huge returns and want to buy into a market. If the market crashes, instead of hunting for bargains people find themeselves haunted by nightmare stories. I think he is partially right here. People my age graduated from college into a hellish economy burnt to a cinder by a massive housing bubble—it's only natural for us to be a bit wary of that smoking crater. But there's more to the story. First, to buy a

Wisdom on Creative Work

From Ira Glass:

On the New Fed Policy Announcement

Matt Yglesias has a good summary  of what's happening and what it means: QE3 is here , and it's pretty big. They've announced a form of "open-ended" quantitative easing in which the central bank commits to "purchasing additional agency mortgage-backed securities at a pace of $40 billion per month."  But there's something much much much more important here than the numbers. It's the guidance. It's not the Evans Plan, and it's not nominal GDP level targeting, but it's good, and it's right here (emphasis added):  To support continued progress toward maximum employment and price stability, the Committee expects that a highly accommodative stance of monetary policy will remain appropriate for a considerable time after the economic recovery strengthens . In particular, the Committee also decided today to keep the target range for the federal funds rate at 0 to 1/4 percent and currently anticipates that exceptionally low level

More Wedding Pictures

Just a few selections from the gazillions of shots: Here's the newlyweds with my new brother's son. Here's the new in-laws. Here's my family. Awwwwww... Very pretty, very short and very, very moving ceremony. Proud to have suddenly expanded the size of my family by ~3000%.

Institution Building in the Teeth of an Incorrect Orthodoxy

Noah Smith has I think a bit of misguided post on Steve Keen, alleging that he's attempting a "purge." Some background: Keen, an Australian economist who's been a longtime proponent of heterodox economics and an early predictor (~2005) predictor of a housing bubble-based recession, has an ongoing spat with Brad Delong, a Berkeley economist. Keen alleges that Delong and others have attempted to appropriate the mantle of non-neoliberal economics without giving proper credit to Keen and others who called the crisis early (see here for some background ). Keen's post (from June, mind you) is a bit unfortunate , but try to see things from his point of view:   One of the ways orthodoxy is enforced is by social pressure. Often, especially when vast amounts of money are at stake, the pressure is personal and vicious. Listen to Keen's voice catch when talking about those times. For years he was alone in the wilderness, professionally scorned and hated, beset on a

Some Reporting I Did

[I'm interested to know what people think of this. I felt a little strange writing it. It's originally posted here .] “Twenty years from now, the next Barack Obama will have come through our program,” says Noah Doyle, a board member of the New Leaders Council, an organization that is building a foundation of progressive leaders throughout the country. The NLC is strikingly different from the typical DC think tank or policy shop focused on electioneering or fighting in the cable news trenches. For the last six years, its main operation is to run a kind of mini-graduate school in cities across the country for up-and-coming progressive political entrepreneurs, or “Fellows,” as they call them. In five weekends over five months, a class of around twenty fellows take classes in things like business, media and communications, campaign management, or political strategy. These fellows then serve as a network of communication and support as they move into their careers throughout the c

The Wedding

Here's my sister and father walking down the aisle. Nice hat, eh?

The Aftermath

I'd say this was the biggest party ever at the homestead.

Programming Note

Sorry for the dead air here over the last few days. I've been swamped with moving our stuff into a new place last weekend, moving out of my old place last week, and coming to my sister's wedding this weekend, back in Colorado. By this time Wednesday I should be back in business.