This and That

Arthur Schlesinger, Historian of Power, Dies at 89

How to Grow a Super Athlete

Using the Web to Get the Boss to Pay More

Darwin’s God

A classic experiment from the 1940s by the psychologists Fritz Heider and Marianne Simmel suggested that imputing agency is so automatic that people may do it even for geometric shapes. For the experiment, subjects watched a film of triangles and circles moving around. When asked what they had been watching, the subjects used words like “chase” and “capture.” They did not just see the random movement of shapes on a screen; they saw pursuit, planning, escape.

So if there is motion just out of our line of sight, we presume it is caused by an agent, an animal or person with the ability to move independently. This usually operates in one direction only; lots of people mistake a rock for a bear, but almost no one mistakes a bear for a rock.

What does this mean for belief in the supernatural? It means our brains are primed for it, ready to presume the presence of agents even when such presence confounds logic. “The most central concepts in religions are related to agents,” Justin Barrett, a psychologist, wrote in his 2004 summary of the byproduct theory, “Why Would Anyone Believe in God?” Religious agents are often supernatural, he wrote, “people with superpowers, statues that can answer requests or disembodied minds that can act on us and the world.”

Risk Manager - A Nobel laureate says learning can be costly

The political and business self-interest behind carbon limits

John Stuart Mill in Math

The Forecast for the Forecasters Is Dismal

"As Yoram K. Bauman, an economist who teaches at the University of Washington and performs stand-up comedy, summed up an often-used line: “Macroeconomists have successfully predicted nine of the last five recessions.”...

Christina Romer, professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley, says economists can’t predict recessions for the same reason stock market analysts can’t accurately predict market crashes. “Both kinds of events, by their nature, are not predictable events,” she said. Almost all the postwar recessions were preceded by a shock, like a spike in short-term interest rates, or a sharp rise in oil prices. “It’s impossible to see the shocks coming,” Ms. Romer said.

On Textbook Writing

Probing the Mind of Bush's Economist, Edward Lazear

On income inequality: It's a good thing when wages at the top grow because it means investments in skills are paying off at a higher rate than they paid off in the past. . . . What we want to do is give the people on the bottom a way to move up, and the way you move is through skills.

On the trade deficit: The reason for the trade deficit ... is primarily, to my mind, the capital account surplus. It's not the trade deficit per se. It's that people want to invest in the United States. ... I think of that as a good thing.

On whether government statistics overstate the rate of inflation: People who understand the issue are pretty much unanimous on that.

Edward Lazear Explains the Trade Deficit with an Identity

Dynamic public finance models

The Capitalist Manifesto