Not In My Back Yard!

I don't want seniors coming to my community, driving up real estate prices, inflating health care costs, and driving 18 miles per hour in a 35 zone (for the love of god, it's the skinny pedal on the right, granny!). Go to India! It's low-rent, good care, and apparently 'In India they really like older people.'

Macroeconomists' dirty secret

The first six or seven paragraphs and the last 2 or 3 are pretty interesting. I don't think I buy the crap in the middle about racism and chauvinism holding together the era of shared prosperity. But, it is the cato institute, so what do you expect them to do? Blame Reago-Bush-onomics? 

Macroeconomists' dirty secret

How bout this. Interesting how Levitt talks about a dearth of macro data for testing current macro models. But here's a dirty little secret: most current macro models cannot be tested empirically because they are founded on Walrasian equilibrium concepts, which, at least as of the time I was in grad school just a few years ago, could not be identified econometrically.

Anyone want to put my name on their AER paper?

Saw this today. If anyone out there has bonuses for getting your papers in top fivers like the ones here, and wants to put my name on their submissions to AER, I'd probably willing to pay the $7,000 shadow price of a deadbeat co-author implied here.

Not a new trend

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US Auto Employment:

For Mancow, Being on Olberman only Seemed like Torture

Mancow (the self-named conservative/libertarian shock jock, not Mankiw, who I sometimes poke fun at as "Mancow") wanted to show that waterboarding wasn't so bad, so he had a a marine do it to him. He lasted 5 seconds. He had actually nearly drowned once in childhood, and said that waterboarding is worse than drowning. Needless to say, he's converted. See his interview on Countdown here:

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Incentives, Wet Diapers, and the Financial Crisis

Be careful how you design incentives.

New blog to watch

Here's a new one for watching - for me it will be more and more useful beginning about 08-27-2009 (plus or minus random error).

Nice Non-technical Discussion of the "Resource Curse"

Three reasons resources are more curse than blessing. Part of the third, which she leaves out, is that the rent seeking behavior, paired with poor governance and the boom-bust volatility in the second, can often mean armed conflict.

Mancow Back on Track (for Now)

Greg Mankiw has started taking a fair, levelheaded assessment of things again. I'm glad to see it and hope it continues without reverting to being a full-time puppet of the Republicanist Party.

Google

This was interesting. Google may be getting a little out of hand. On the other hand, if you just want information about something, this is an interesting new question-answering tool from Wolfram.

Why do Southern States have a Low HDI?

This was an interesting post on Andrew Gelman's stats blog. Basically, it talks about a new way of thinking about "human development" in the US by state, and compares it to an old way - the inverse of the distance to the Canadian border. What's about as interesting was this comment to a Catherine Campbell post at Economix:

Tom Friedman has often observed that poorly educated, unemployed youth in
Arab countries turned to fundamentalism. He blames the inefficient kleptocracies
that run these countries for these backward attitudes.
Is something like this
happening in the solid Republican states?

Hmmm.

Learn a Little Applied Math & Science

Have a listen here. An interesting look at where the jobs are.

Milton Friedman and Richard Nixon: World Renowned Socialists

Why hasn't anyone mentioned the fact that Friedman and Nixon advocated a Family Assistance Prgram Negative Income Tax system to supplement and reform welfare and create incentives for poor families to work.

Norway, Dutch Disease, and Saving

Saw this article about Norway today. It seems obviousl that countries with resource wealth can use savings to keep their economy stable during a global recession like the one we're in. But this very saving can also have impacts on that country's exchange rate, as well as on wages and returns to capital that stymie investment in manufacturing sectors during normal times. It's known as dutch disease.

Trucks and Trade

Anyone know that there is a 25% tariff on "motor vehicles for the transport of goods" and the tariff on regular autos is just 2.5%? Check this out. Maybe that's also keeping us from showing much real innovation in the auto industry generally. Can't make a better hybrid? Make more gas-guzzling trucks with the complements of tariff protection.

It also makes me more frustrated about trucks. I've always wanted some sort of fuel-inefficiency tax (instead of binding restrictions) on gas-guzzlers, especially trucks. The response I get is that well, we can't tax commercial trucks more than passenger cars because farmers and other workin folks use them - it's not "fair!" Well, now it turns out we ALREADY have a higher tax on pickemup trucks than cars, so all we'd really have to do to apply the appropriate "incentives" (in this case sticks) to nudge production is: (1) make the tax nondiscriminating (apply equally to foreign and domestic producers instead of a tariff); (2) progressively tax inefficient cars at higher rates up in reverse proportion to their mpg rating and emissions.

Most Economists

Some people get the idea that economists are somehow "liberal" or "conservative." Most are really neither. Instead of being ideologues on any particular issue, economists are nerds who think about technical models and behavioural assumptions. And we usually see the world in shades of gray. That's why there's really less political polarization than most people think, as this by the Free Exchange and this by David Colander point out. For the most part economists see the world as one big trade-off. One policy prescripting is appropriate if the conditions support assumptions A, B, and C, but the exact opposite is appropriate if A', B', and C' are true. Hence, Harry Truman's quip about wanting a one-handed economist.

If you do happen to be an ideologue, on either side, you probably won't like what an economist has to tell you about it, because the support you get will be equivocal, at best.

Some Banks Do Fail

Here's a list since Feb. 2007:

	Bank Name	Closing Date
1	First Bank of Idaho, Ketchum, ID	24-Apr-09
2	First Bank of Beverly Hills, Calabasas, CA	24-Apr-09
3	Heritage Bank, Farmington Hills, MI	24-Apr-09
4	American Southern Bank, Kennesaw, GA	24-Apr-09
5	Great Basin Bank of Nevada, Elko, NV	17-Apr-09
6	American Sterling Bank, Sugar Creek, MO	17-Apr-09
7	New Frontier Bank, Greeley, CO	10-Apr-09
8	Cape Fear Bank, Wilmington, NC	10-Apr-09
9	Omni National Bank, Atlanta, GA	27-Mar-09
10	TeamBank, National Association, Paola, KS	20-Mar-09
11	Colorado National Bank, Colorado Springs, CO	20-Mar-09
12	FirstCity Bank, Stockbridge, GA	20-Mar-09
13	Freedom Bank of Georgia, Commerce, GA	6-Mar-09
14	Security Savings Bank, Henderson, NV	27-Feb-09
15	Heritage Community Bank, Glenwood, IL	27-Feb-09
16	Silver Falls Bank, Silverton, OR	20-Feb-09
17	Pinnacle Bank of Oregon, Beaverton, OR	13-Feb-09
18	Corn Belt Bank and Trust Company, Pittsfield, IL	13-Feb-09
19	Riverside Bank of the Gulf Coast, Cape Coral, FL	13-Feb-09
20	Sherman County Bank, Loup City, NE	13-Feb-09
21	County Bank, Merced, CA	6-Feb-09
22	Alliance Bank, Culver City, CA	6-Feb-09
23	FirstBank Financial Services, McDonough, GA	6-Feb-09
24	Ocala National Bank, Ocala, FL	30-Jan-09
25	Suburban Federal Savings Bank, Crofton, MD	30-Jan-09
26	MagnetBank, Salt Lake City, UT	30-Jan-09
27	1st Centennial Bank, Redlands, CA	23-Jan-09
28	Bank of Clark County, Vancouver, WA	16-Jan-09
29	National Bank of Commerce, Berkeley, IL	16-Jan-09
30	Sanderson State Bank, Sanderson, TX	12-Dec-08
31	Haven Trust Bank, Duluth, GA	12-Dec-08
32	First Georgia Community Bank, Jackson, GA	5-Dec-08
33	PFF Bank and Trust, Pomona, CA	21-Nov-08
34	Downey Savings and Loan, Newport Beach, CA	21-Nov-08
35	The Community Bank, Loganville, GA	21-Nov-08
36	Security Pacific Bank, Los Angeles, CA	7-Nov-08
37	Franklin Bank, SSB, Houston, TX	7-Nov-08
38	Freedom Bank, Bradenton, FL	31-Oct-08
39	Alpha Bank & Trust, Alpharetta, GA	24-Oct-08
40	Meridian Bank, Eldred, IL	10-Oct-08
41	Main Street Bank, Northville, MI	10-Oct-08
42	Washington Mutual Bank, Henderson, NV and Washington Mutual Bank FSB, Park City, UT	25-Sep-08
43	Ameribank, Northfork, WV	19-Sep-08
44	Silver State Bank, Henderson, NV	5-Sep-08
45	Integrity Bank, Alpharetta, GA	29-Aug-08
46	The Columbian Bank and Trust, Topeka, KS	22-Aug-08
47	First Priority Bank, Bradenton, FL	1-Aug-08
48	First Heritage Bank, NA, Newport Beach, CA	25-Jul-08
49	First National Bank of Nevada, Reno, NV	25-Jul-08
50	IndyMac Bank, Pasadena, CA	11-Jul-08
51	First Integrity Bank, NA, Staples, MN	30-May-08
52	ANB Financial, NA, Bentonville, AR	9-May-08
53	Hume Bank, Hume, MO	7-Mar-08
54	Douglass National Bank, Kansas City, MO	25-Jan-08
55	Miami Valley Bank, Lakeview, OH	4-Oct-07
56	NetBank, Alpharetta, GA	28-Sep-07
57	Metropolitan Savings Bank, Pittsburgh, PA	2-Feb-07

Tea and Tyrrany

Maybe we should have less indignation over taxes and tea and save some of it to torture (over the actual doing of it not the audacity of those who inform the on it), warrentless wiretaps, and strip searching schoolchildren. Just a thought.