Advice of the Day- We're on Borrowed Time

 Charles Wheelan commencement talk;

What it means for you, and what I’ve found to be one the great challenges of adulthood, is balancing present and future. If you want to do great things in a decade or two, you need to grind away now. You need to do things that you would prefer not to do, to spend time on things that you don’t particularly enjoy. Frankly, that’s an important part of your 20s. Sorry to be the bearer of that message. But you can’t lose sight of the fact that there are no guarantees in life. If you grind away miserably to become the CEO, no one can promise you that it will work out that way, or that the sacrifice will be worth it even if it does. On the other hand, if you spend most of your time skateboarding with friends and playing video games, I can pretty much assure you that your professional accomplishments will be limited.


You have to navigate that trade-off. On this point, I do have advice, which is to take joy in the journey, rather than building your life around how good you expect the view to be when you get to the top. Again, by the way, the happiness research is clear. Most people overstate how much they will enjoy that next promotion and the stuff it can buy—because we get used to them so quickly. By next Monday, it’s another job and a bigger TV that you still can’t find the remote control for.

Are you sponge worthy?

In an episode of the television sitcom Seinfeld, Elaine Benes’s favorite contraceptive sponge is taken off the market. She scours pharmacies to stock up, but her supply is now finite, so she must “reevaluate her whole screening process.” Every time she dates a new man, she has to consider whether he is “spongeworthy.”

When Elaine uses a sponge, Dixit says, she is forfeiting the option to have it available when an even better man comes along. He developed a mathematical model to quantify this concept of spongeworthiness many years ago, but kept quiet because it seemed inappropriate at the time. “I hope that my advanced age now exempts me from the constraints of political correctness,” Dixit wrote after retiring from teaching earlier this year

Houses of Economists- Carmen M. Reinhart

Rogoff and Carmen at Carmen's house

After much hand-wringing, he decided to return to the United States to attend Yale, which overlooked his threadbare high school transcript. He considered majoring in Russian until Jeremy Bulow, a classmate who is now an economics professor at Stanford, began evangelizing about economics.

Mr. Rogoff took an econometrics course, reveling in its precision and rigor, and went on to focus on comparative economic systems. He interrupted a brief stint in a graduate program in economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to prepare for the world chess championships, which were held only every three years.

After becoming an “international grandmaster,” the highest title awarded in chess, when he was 25, he decided to quit chess entirely and to return to M.I.T. He did so because he had snared the grandmaster title and because he realized that he would probably never be ranked No. 1.

He says it took him a long time to get over the game, and the euphoric, almost omnipotent highs of his past victories.

“To this day I get letters, maybe every two years, from top players asking me: ‘How do I quit? I want to quit like you did, and I can’t figure out how to do it,’ ” he says. “I tell them that it’s hard to go from being at the top of a field, because you really feel that way when you’re playing chess and winning, to being at the bottom — and they need to prepare themselves for that.”

He returned to M.I.T., rushed through what he acknowledges was a mediocre doctoral dissertation, and then became a researcher at the Federal Reserve — where he said he had good role models who taught him how to be, at last, “professional” and “serious.” ...

And, unlike Mr. Rogoff, she has never been hired by an Ivy League school. But measured by how often her work is cited by colleagues and others, this woman whom several colleagues describe as a “firecracker” is, by a long shot, the most influential female economist in the world.

Like Mr. Rogoff, she took a circuitous route to her present position.

Born in Havana as Carmen Castellanos, she is quick-witted and favors bright, boldly printed blouses and blazers. As a girl, she memorized the lore of pirates and their trade routes, which she says was her first exposure to the idea that economic fortunes — and state revenue in particular — “can suddenly disappear without warning.”

She also lived with more personal financial and social instability. After her family fled Havana for the United States with just three suitcases when she was 10, her father traded a comfortable living as an accountant for long, less lucrative hours as a carpenter. Her mother, who had never worked outside the home before, became a seamstress.

“Most kids don’t grow up with that kind of real economic shock,” she says. “But I learned the value of scarcity, and even the sort of tensions between East and West. And at a very early age that had an imprint on me.”

With a passion for art and literature — even today, her academic papers pun on the writings of Gabriel García Márquez — she enrolled in a two-year college in Miami, intending to study fashion merchandising. Then, on a whim, she took an economics course and got hooked.

When she went to Florida International University to study economics, she met Peter Montiel, an M.I.T. graduate who was teaching there. Recognizing her talent, he helped her apply to a top-tier graduate program in economics, at Columbia University.

At Columbia, she met her future husband, Vincent Reinhart, who is now an occasional co-author with her. They married while in graduate school, and she quit school before writing her dissertation to try to make some money on Wall Street.

“We were newlyweds, and neither of us had a penny to our name,” she says. She left school so that they “could have nice things and a house, the kind of things I imagined a family should have.”

She spent a few years at Bear Stearns, including one as chief economist, before deciding to finish her graduate work at Columbia and return to her true love: data mining. “I have a talent for rounding up data like cattle, all over the plain,” she says.

Desks of Economists Series

Guess who?

Related: Economists who Fish

Bernanke- young and happy

Source

Elinor Ostrum in South Asia

In the south Asian context, the key contribution by Elinor Ostrom, along with other scholars (Shivakoti and Ostrom 2002) has been to provide effective empirical understanding of the performance of different types of irrigation institutional arrangements, along with a theoretical understanding of how these systems work. She demonstrated the importance of involving farmer-users in the design and management of irrigation systems for successful local resource management policies in Nepal. Work in Asia had amply demonstrated that large, centralised and essentially top-down government management systems tended to underperform, with lower rates of return on investment than systems where incentives to engineers were aligned to those of local farmer-users with their active participation (Wade 1982; Lam 1995; Ostrom 2002). Several Indian scholars have been inspired by Ostrom’s work to study issues of collective action and governance of common property resources, and to search for alternative frameworks for understanding how best to manage such resources which are often vital to the very existence of rural livelihoods in India. A large body of literature exists in India on the contributions of common property resources or CPRs as they are commonly labelled. The National Sample Survey too devoted a special round (54th round) to the de jure and de facto existence and contributions of CPRs in India, particularly in terms of their provisioning services such as fuel-wood, fodder and non-timber forest products from forests. Her work and that following hers in south Asia and elsewhere has found that institutions for collective action can emerge in rural societies characterised by inequality, prior history and poor implementation of centrally determined legal structures. Village society was often able to accept some amount of inequality, overlook prior history and agree on common norms of behaviour to solve the problems of the commons.


Several scholars from south Asia benefited from visiting the “Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis”, which Ostrom established in 1973, along with her husband Vincent, a political scientist at the Indiana University Bloomington. Over time, the Workshop has turned out to be an extraordinary forum for productive deliberations from evolving associations of students and professors thereby producing a wealth of theory, empirical studies and experiments at the interface of political economy, social anthropology, economics, political science, and policy studies thereby further enriching the interdisciplinary discourse of collective action. Quite a few of the research students of Ostrom have visited Indian institutes (Institute of Economic Growth (IEG) in Delhi, being one of the prominent ones) and have worked with Indian scholars, thereby resulting in further exchanges. Ostrom herself has visited academic institutions in India a few times, the most recent visit being at the IEG in October 2008, providing the researchers the intellectual space to discuss and debate design issues in moving from models of governance of local to global commons.

Source: EPW

Related:


Elinor Ostrom and the Future of Economics
Vincent and Elinor Ostrom and public ownership of natural resources

Podcast: Elinor Ostrom Checks In
A Case Study for Elinor Ostrom's 2009 Nobel Speech?

The Significance of Elinor Ostrom’s Nobel

Books vs Articles: The Flaying of Elinor Ostrom;

Her important book that was key to her prize, Governing the Commons, 1990, has been riduculed because presumably unlike an article in the AER, it did not go through a "peer review" process

Elinor Ostrom on the Market, the State, and the Third Sector

The Ostrom Nobel


An institutional economics prize
Ostrom and Williamson get the Riksbank

What this Nobel prize means
Rethinking Institutional Analysis: Interviews with Vincent and Elinor Ostrom

Elinor Ostrom and the well-governed commons

Elinor Ostrom - Nobel Laureate 2009
Ostrom on institutions: complex solutions can spontaneously emerge

Reality bites
Congratulations to Elinor Ostrom and Oliver Williamson;

Congratulations go out to Elinor Ostrom, co-author of The Samaritan’s Dilemma: The Political Economy of Development Aid (OUP, 2005) and Oliver Williamson, author of The Mechanisms of Governance (OUP, 1999), Organization Theory: From Chester Barnard to the Present and Beyond, 2nd Edition (OUP, 1995), and The Nature of the Firm: Origins, Evolution, and Development (OUP, 1993).

See the world like Elinor Ostrom

To see the world more like Elinor Ostrom is to be guided less by ideology and more by the contours of the situation — to use the right institutional tool for the job. “[N]ational governments,” Ostrom tells us, “are too small to govern the global commons and too big to handle smaller scale problems.”

Skyhooks versus Cranes: The Nobel Prize for Elinor Ostrom;

To understand BOTH why we don’t need police officers in some cases AND why police officers don’t follow the rules in other cases, we have to expand models of human preferences to include a contingent taste for punishing others. In reaching this conclusion, she arrived at a point similar to that reached by Avner Greif (whom the Nobel committee correctly cites.)

Princeton’s Dixit Discusses Nobel for Ostrom, Williamson: Audio

G-20 and John Nash

Essential task for G20 leaders is a cinema trip to see 'A Beautiful Mind' by Mohamed A El-Erian and Mike Spence;

The US is in the grips of an accelerating process of employment destruction, with over half of the 4.4m jobs lost in the last four of the 14 consecutive months of contraction. Accordingly, its policymakers are pressing other countries to internationalise a massive fiscal stimulus effort. In doing so, they also recognise that the return to the stimulus will be much higher if the financial system and housing are stabilised, because they too are part of the negative feedback dynamics.

Eurozone countries generally agree on the importance of fiscal stimulus. Yet they are not surprisingly uncomfortable with what the US is pressing for. The recession in the region is less advanced, the tolerance for economic pain is higher, and the cross-border leakages are significant.

In these European countries, the focus instead is on long-standing concerns about abuses in the financial sector which are seen to have provided both the fuel and the spark for today's global crisis. Accordingly, policymakers stress financial regulatory reform as the key components of crisis management and crisis prevention.

At one level, emerging economies do not disagree with the US and Europe. Yet, when it comes to their central revealed preference, the onus is to stress a third element: the need to counter trade protectionism and ensure the appropriate flows of international capital. Brazil's President Lula's forcefully advocated this position when he visited President Obama in the Oval Office earlier this month.

Here is where John Nash comes in. The differing onus reflects the fact that various countries start with diverse "dominant strategies" consistent with differences in their initial conditions, be they economic, political or social. Moreover, there is merit in all three. Yet, as the concept and incentive structure of the "prisoners' dilemma" illustrates, the world will undoubtedly end up with a sub-optimal outcome if each party to the solution were to follow just its dominant strategy.

Given the accelerating nature of the crisis, a Nash equilibrium of this type would go down in history as a notable lost opportunity, if not a disastrous mistake similar to what occurred in the international conference of 1933. Accordingly, and again using Nash's framework, the world needs to find a way of "imposing" a more "cooperative solution." What is needed domestically and globally is a coordinated solution that changes the payoffs and hence the virulence of the downward dynamics.

The two traditional ways to get there are ineffective in today's global economy. The IMF needs to address long-standing representation, governance and expertise deficits before it can restore its position at the centre of the international monetary system. The alternative of single country leadership requires a weakened US to step up to the plate more forcefully and, critically, in a manner that recognises that persuasion will work better than lecturing.

So, are we doomed to end up in a sub-optimal non-cooperative Nash equilibrium? The probability is high but it is not inevitable. There is still time for more meaningful cooperation among countries based on the simultaneous, rather than sequential, pursuit of the three priorities: real economy stimulus, financial system stabilisation and openness.

Parenting skills of Mankiw

Mankiw's favorite children's books;

Miss Rumphius
By Barbara Cooney

Cactus Hotel
By Brenda Z. Guiberson

Frindle
By Andrew Clements

Kensuke's Kingdom
By Michael Morpurgo

Joey Pigza Swallowed the Key
By Jack Gantos

John Kay's ‘long walk’ problems

For years, I have identified what I think of as ‘long walk’ problems - knotty issues that are best tackled if you can get away from it all. I often come back with an answer, or a few paragraphs, composed in my head.

David Friedman at Google

Future Imperfect: Technology and Freedom in an Uncertain World

The Strengths and Weaknesses of Ben Bernanke

Ben Bernanke's Fed: The Federal Reserve After Greenspan

Advise to the Young Economist

For those of you who have yet to encounter Gordon's scholarship, I urge you to purchase and to read, cover to cover, the 10 volume Selected Works of Gordon Tullock, that I recently edited for Liberty Fund. There is no better education for a young economist aspiring to contribute in the tradition of Virginia Political Economy, no better introduction into the ways of truly creative Renaissance Scholarship.

-Gordon Tullock is Retiring (an alternative title could be Gordon Tulllock is becoming more polite)

Lectures and Talks

Reviving the Invisible Hand: the case for classical liberalism in the 21st century

Principles and Practice of Global Economic Governance
Prof. Jose Antonio Ocampo, former UN Undersecretary-General for Economic and Social Affairs, currently Professor in the Professional Practice of International and Public Affairs at SIPA, Columbia University

Understanding tribal warfare: Kenya

The Natural State
Prof. Douglass C. North

The Stuff of Thought: Language as a window into human nature

Public Diplomacy in the Twenty-First Century

Democracy and Autocracy in Eurasia: Georgia in Transition

Finance in East Asia: from crisis to integration - challenges of second generation reforms

Good Governance
Prof. Jobst Fiedler, Associate Dean, Hertie School of Governance

A discussion about the Federal Reserve
Markus Brunnermeier, Wei Xiong, Harrison Hong

Podcasts

John Taylor on Monetary Policy

El-Erian Says Banks Face Harder Time Raising Capital
El-Erian's latest book, ``When Markets Collide: Investment Strategies for the Age of Global Economic Change.''

The Stuff of Thought with Steven Pinker

Georgia revisited

Confessions of a subprime lender

Chinese repression of Falung Gong


Paying to be permanent
A high number of people who get Australian permanent resident visas don't get the skilled jobs they are trained for. And there are scams aplenty in the world of international students looking for any way to stay here.

Objective truth
For a long time now, it has been fashionable to say that what science offers is not a true mirror of nature but a distorting mirror, reflecting our presuppositions, prejudices and politics. But can we take the criticisms on board while still maintaining a belief in objective truth? We meet a philosopher who says we can. Also, objectivity and the arts: can artistic judgments ever be objective or is it all down to just knowing what you like?

Uprootedness and national conflicts
he French philosopher and social activist Simone Weil identified the basic human need for roots as crucial. Uprootedness and disapora in the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians have shaped the narratives about the past and the future on both sides. Jonathan Glover, a Professor of Philosophy at King's College London has been in Australia to deliver the annual Simone Weil lecture on human value

The Wallace-Darwin papers on biological evolution - 150 years ago

Lung transplant
Australia has one of the highest success rates in organ and tissue transplantation, but it also has one of the world's lowest donation rates. About 3,000 Australians are on the official organ and tissue transplant waiting list and 20% of the people waiting for a heart, lung or liver transplant will die before they receive one. ABC journalist Phil Ashley Brown met a patient 20 minutes after she received the good news that she would get new lungs and he follows her progress through the transplant and recovery


Picture this!
Images by the illustrator and author Shaun Tan adorn the Children's Book Council's advertising for this year's Book Week (16-22 August, 2008). Reflecting on his fascination with both writing and painting, he reveals his thoughts on visual literacy and about creating an intimate distance between words and pictures.

People

Hanif Kureishi;

Kureishi’s latest novel, “Something to Tell You,” which will be published in the United States later this month, is his most ambitious book since “The Black Album.” A sprawling romp set in London, it centers on Jamal, an Anglo-Pakistani Freudian analyst confronting certain unresolved questions about his past. Along the way, his best friend, Henry, takes up with Jamal’s sister, Miriam, a petty drug dealer and distributor of porn videos and other items that fell off the back of a truck. Everyone is swept up in a wave of late-onset kinkiness. As in so much of Kureishi’s work, there’s a lot of sex here. Little is left to the imagination. At one point, Jamal goes to a basement sex club, its walls covered in whips and costumes, and asks a prostitute to dress like a British Airways hostess. While he waits for the Viagra and the painkillers to kick in, the prostitute tells him she’s working toward a master’s degree. “She was ‘doing’ decadence and apocalypse, always a turn-of-the-century preoccupation, along with calls for a ‘return to the family,’ ” Kureishi writes. “Unfortunately, this millennium, our fears had turned out to be realities. It had been worse than we imagined.”

In our conversation, Kureishi described the novel as “a critique of the notion of limitless pleasure,” a re-examination of the sexual revolution. “Is this what we thought we would be in the ’60s when were dancing around with flowers in our hair wanting a more erotic and a more sexual life?” he said as he drank his peppermint tea. “If the society doesn’t install the values anymore,” he went on to say, “your happiness and your pleasure is entirely up to you; you have to work and earn it and install your own moral values.” This, he pointed out, accounts for a common “complaint of the West against radical Islam: ‘Why do they have to keep asking God? Why can’t they, as it were, make up their own minds?’ Well, it’s much harder to install your own moral values than to have them imposed by other people or by the system.” Things were “miserable” when he was growing up in the ’60s before the sexual revolution, Kureishi said, but now, he added, “we’ve moved from repression to unrepression” — which comes with its own strictures.

As is clear from his new novel, Kureishi often uses a psychoanalytic lens. He himself has been in therapy since the ’90s — “you start to feel better after about 10 years,” he joked — and related that it has been “very stimulating in terms of ideas” and “ways of seeing the world.” But for him, the return of the repressed transcends Freudian cliché. It’s a crucial theme, a key to understanding recent history, not just family dynamics. In Kureishi’s view, radical Islam and radical sexuality intersect. “They produce each other in some way,” he said. Indeed, to Kureishi, the rise of radical Islam is nothing less than the return of the repressed writ large. “You can’t help but laugh,” he told me. “The project of the West, the Nietzschean project, has been to drive out religion and to produce a secular society in which men and women make their own values because morality is gone. Then suddenly radical religion returns from the Third World. How can you not laugh at that? How can you not find that a deep historical irony?”...
Writing runs in the Kureishi family. Hanif’s father, who worked for decades as a civil servant at the Pakistani Embassy in London, was an aspiring writer who remained unpublished. Kureishi wrote “My Ear at His Heart,” his 2004 memoir about his father, after his agent, Deborah Rogers, gave him a manuscript his father once submitted to her. Fathers and sons remain a deep and abiding theme. Kureishi’s own family life is not uncomplicated. His 1998 novella, “Intimacy,” is a brutal account of a man on the eve of leaving his partner and two small sons for a beautiful younger woman — as Kureishi himself had done. (Over the years, Kureishi has been criticized for misogyny and emotional cruelty, not least for the number he does on the woman left behind in “Intimacy.”) Today, Kureishi lives in a row house with his partner, Monique Proudlove, and their 10-year-old son, Kier, while Sachin and Carlo, his 14-year-old twin sons from his earlier relationship with Tracey Scoffield, a film-and-television producer, are often around.

After breakfast at the local cafe, I persuade Kureishi to let me see his house and study. Earlier, he told me he was reluctant to have me “round” since “the missus” doesn’t like journalists, but it quickly becomes clear from Proudlove, a self-possessed woman with slate-gray eyes who greets us in the entrance hall, that it’s Kureishi who’s protective of his privacy. In the living room, which is dominated by a drum kit, I was struck by the juxtaposition of books on the shelf: some novels by Henry James, Caroline Moorehead’s biography of Bertrand Russell, Jean-Paul Sartre’s “Situations” next to Naipaul’s “Among the Believers” next to Roger Scruton’s “Sexual Desire: A Moral Philosophy of the Erotic.” Definitely guidebooks to Kureishiland. The writer works in a roomy study upstairs, its walls filled with images: a photo of the young John Lennon, a poster of a painting by William Blake, a Matisse-like painting of Monique. There are stacks of CDs on the desk — Prince, Jeff Buckley, the soundtrack to “Trainspotting” — and some photos of Kureishi’s sons. Above the desk I also notice a small black-and-white image: a man on his knees, his face firmly planted between the legs of a naked woman.

This is not surprising. Kureishi’s books are extremely raunchy. Nearly every page you turn, someone is being fellated, spanked, tugged on — or is thinking about it. Nipples are clamped. Wax is dripped. Things are inserted into places you would hardly have imagined possible. In the ’70s, Kureishi even wrote literary pornography under the pen name Antonia French. I ask him about his interest in pornography, which seems to go beyond the strictly anthropological. “When I was a kid and you wanted to come into contact with something sexy or dirty, you’d read a book,” Kureishi said. “Can you imagine?” Harold Robbins, Henry Miller, the Marquis de Sade. “D. H. Lawrence, can you imagine, as a sexual aid?” Today, literary pornography is a lost art, he says, but dirty pictures are available everywhere. “The much more interesting question might be, ‘What else is it that people need to make a life?’ It might be very easy to find sexual satisfaction, but getting someone to love you for a long time or loving someone might be more interesting.” This is a thoughtful observation — but it doesn’t entirely answer the question.

Nouriel Roubini;

On a cold and dreary day last winter, I met Roubini over lunch in the TriBeCa neighborhood of New York City. “I’m not a pessimist by nature,” he insisted. “I’m not someone who sees things in a bleak way.” Just looking at him, I found the assertion hard to credit. With a dour manner and an aura of gloom about him, Roubini gives the impression of being permanently pained, as if the burden of what he knows is almost too much for him to bear. He rarely smiles, and when he does, his face, topped by an unruly mop of brown hair, contorts into something more closely resembling a grimace.

When I pressed him on his claim that he wasn’t pessimistic, he paused for a moment and then relented a little. “I have more concerns about potential risks and vulnerabilities than most people,” he said, with glum understatement. But these concerns, he argued, make him more of a realist than a pessimist and put him in the role of the cleareyed outsider — unsettling complacency and puncturing pieties.

Roubini, who is 50, has been an outsider his entire life. He was born in Istanbul, the child of Iranian Jews, and his family moved to Tehran when he was 2, then to Tel Aviv and finally to Italy, where he grew up and attended college. He moved to the United States to pursue his doctorate in international economics at Harvard. Along the way he became fluent in Farsi, Hebrew, Italian and English. His accent, an inimitable polyglot growl, radiates a weariness that comes with being what he calls a “global nomad.”

As a graduate student at Harvard, Roubini was an unusual talent, according to his adviser, the Columbia economist Jeffrey Sachs. He was as comfortable in the world of arcane mathematics as he was studying political and economic institutions. “It’s a mix of skills that rarely comes packaged in one person,” Sachs told me. After completing his Ph.D. in 1988, Roubini joined the economics department at Yale, where he first met and began sharing ideas with Robert Shiller, the economist now known for his prescient warnings about the 1990s tech bubble.

The ’90s were an eventful time for an international economist like Roubini. Throughout the decade, one emerging economy after another was beset by crisis, beginning with Mexico’s in 1994. Panics swept Asia, including Thailand, Indonesia and Korea, in 1997 and 1998. The economies of Brazil and Russia imploded in 1998. Argentina’s followed in 2000. Roubini began studying these countries and soon identified what he saw as their common weaknesses. On the eve of the crises that befell them, he noticed, most had huge current-account deficits (meaning, basically, that they spent far more than they made), and they typically financed these deficits by borrowing from abroad in ways that exposed them to the national equivalent of bank runs. Most of these countries also had poorly regulated banking systems plagued by excessive borrowing and reckless lending. Corporate governance was often weak, with cronyism in abundance.

Roubini’s work was distinguished not only by his conclusions but also by his approach. By making extensive use of transnational comparisons and historical analogies, he was employing a subjective, nontechnical framework, the sort embraced by popular economists like the Times Op-Ed columnist Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz in order to reach a nonacademic audience. Roubini takes pains to note that he remains a rigorous scholarly economist — “When I weigh evidence,” he told me, “I’m drawing on 20 years of accumulated experience using models” — but his approach is not the contemporary scholarly ideal in which an economist builds a model in order to constrain his subjective impressions and abide by a discrete set of data. As Shiller told me, “Nouriel has a different way of seeing things than most economists: he gets into everything.”

Roubini likens his style to that of a policy maker like Alan Greenspan, the former Fed chairman who was said (perhaps apocryphally) to pore over vast quantities of technical economic data while sitting in the bathtub, looking to sniff out where the economy was headed. Roubini also cites, as a more ideologically congenial example, the sweeping, cosmopolitan approach of the legendary economist John Maynard Keynes, whom Roubini, with only slight exaggeration, calls “the most brilliant economist who never wrote down an equation.” The book that Roubini ultimately wrote (with the economist Brad Setser) on the emerging market crises, “Bailouts or Bail-Ins?” contains not a single equation in its 400-plus pages.

Assorted Economic Podcasts

Allan Meltzer Says Fed Failing to Control Inflation

Harvard's Feldstein Says Fed Slow to Recognize Credit Crisis

James Poterba Says U.S. Consumer `Likely' to Retrench

Podcast of the Day

Robert Barro on Disasters

Sloppy writing reflects (and advertises) sloppy thinking

Over at MR, Tyler Cowen quotes John Cochrane on the Milton Friedman protest letter;

...it is to me sadder still how atrociously written this letter is. These people devote their lives to writing on social issues, and teaching freshmen (including mine) how to think and write clearly. Yet it’s awful.

Milton would probably have said the same thing as he had said to Gary Becker;

"People often excuse bad writing by saying that they know what they mean, and simply have difficulty expressing it. That is nonsense. If you cannot state a preposition clearly and unambiguously, you do not understand it.I took that lesson to heart. I learned that trying to write something clearly and unambiguously was the best way to find errors and omissions in my reasoning and clarify my own thought.

It was in a letter to Gary Becker in May 1955, when I was in Britain, referring to a draft of his thesis that he had sent to me: Nine times out of ten, I wrote after criticizing his exposition, sloppy writing reflects (and advertises) sloppy thinking.

Related;
Milton Friedman on Iraq War
Anecdotes about Milton Friedman

"I Do Not Believe the State Has Any Right to Tell Me What to Put In My Head"

Book Recommendation

The Street Porter and the Philosopher; Conversations on Analytical Egalitarianism
Sandra J. Peart and David M. Levy, editors

Include essays by:

* James M. Buchanan
* Tyler Cowen,
* Eric Crampton, University of Canterbury, New Zealand
* M. Ali Khan, Johns Hopkins University
* Thomas Leonard, Princeton University
* Deirdre McCloskey, University of Illinois, Chicago
* Warren J. Samuels, Professor Emeritus, Michigan State University
* Gordon Tullock, George Mason University

Quote of the Day

“How the discipline of economics fares in revealing previously unrecognized social relations depends on the competition of disciplines in terms of both subject matter and techniques, as Coase has noted. I expect economics to fare well in this competition, but in the end to reveal, describe, and explain no more than an island in man’s behavior.”

-G. Warren Nutter 1979, p. 268.

cited in How to Buy, Sell, Make, Manage, Invent, Produce, Transact, Consume, Marry with Words by Deirdre McCloskey