Apologies, but Sophia, in all her glorious 9 days on this earth, has occupied her parents completely. I’ve barely had time to catch up on other blogs, newspapers etc. We’re currently following the “when she sleeps, we sleep” rule, which leaves litle opportunity to catch up on some reading. About the only advantage of being […]
A nice voluntary wealth redistribution story. Can’t solve the whole problem but what I’m wondering is whether tourists now will be more or less inclined to toss a coin into the Trevi. I can see few scenarios:
Neutral: most people don’t give a damn and continue as before
Less money is thrown in because individuals thought they […]
Weighing in at 7lbs 1oz, Sophia was born at 0951 on 21 November. Parent economists are both fine, though Daddy is extremely tired. Despite he exhaustion of watching a loved one endure incalculable physical pain, there are a number of other random observations that I intend to expand on, once my brain gets into gear:
Many […]
Baby Boot is two days late. And we discovered last week that apparently my wife and I don’t agree on a middle name for a girl (and still have a disagreement of the ordering of the names should it be a boy). Perhaps we can take inspiration from this list of the most popular celebrity-inspired names in Britain, […]
Update. From the BBC website,
Chancellor Gordon Brown described Mr Friedman as “one of the great economic theorists” of the 20th century. He had a major influence on post-war economic policy not least in establishing the importance of credibility in monetary policy making,”
I think Milton’s views on central bank credibilty extended to replacing bankers with a […]
Economics is boring to many I think, because it lacks the narrative drive of history, or the unifying approach of the hard sciences. Both views are of course incorrect but in Friedman there was an individual whose own work and life had both great narrative and a simple, consistent approach. Motivated almost solely with the aim of […]
Why do sub-optimal policies arise through the political process? Why do misconceptions about, for example immigration, survive year after year? Bryan Caplan believes voter irrationality is to blame. The public hold not just weird but contrary beliefs to experts in the field; the conclusion is to leave complex decision making to elites of experts (or […]
The purchase of residential wind turbines is proving popular, but as this story highlights, this may not be the best way to be green.
Except if all you’re interested in is looking green then it may be the right thing to do. As with supporting a charity, for many people it’s which charity they support, and […]
Certainly not this guy, a cognitive neuroscientist who used his knowledge of how memory works to win $500,000.
When I’ve watched TV quiz shows and played along, I’ve either known the answer or used probabilistic reasoning, which goes something like this: “This is a TV quiz show, so some of the answers, even to esoteric questions, […]
So now The Lancet has got me really irked. Scientists, particularly epidemiologists, are fond of pointing out how the general public has such a poor understanding of statistics and science. And it’s a fair criticism; witness the hysteria over mad cows or the MMR jab (I personally think an interpretation of statistics course should be […]
Christmas comes but once a year - so how come it seems to take me by surprise as far as gift shopping goes? Of course, despite the advance warning, I never contemplate doing the shopping in September, partly because I am not conditioned to think about the gifts until the requsite environmental cues are salient […]
No, not Stern, but from this week’s Time Out comes a story (sorry, no link) perfectly illustrating the idea of trade-offs and unlike the usual environment-vs-business conflict, this has at its heart the conflict over two environmental goals.
“…proposals to build an £18.5m lock on…part of the River Lea…have raised a complex environmental debate. The lock […]
I have no reason to doubt that the writers at The Economist, and Jane Galt, are truly educated people, if only because, as George Bernard Shaw noted, the mark of intellect is a passion for statistics.
The Economist’s new blog demonstrates this passion in the ongoing debate of the Lancet Study. The posts continue with the […]
