economics
mikethemadbiologist | February 11, 2010...Japanese industry decides that it needs to move away from making things people usually like to buy. Whiskey Tango Foxtrot:
Many economists and business executives say they hope that Toyota's trauma will be the unsettling blow that Japan needs to understand that its reliance on manufacturing and industrial exports, which served the country so well after World War II, is no longer wise.
Yukio Noguchi, a professor of finance at Waseda University in Tokyo, said Japan must finally evolve into a postindustrial, service-based economy -- a painful transition that the United States and Great…
mikethemadbiologist | February 11, 2010While I'm not that big a fan of the project trying to find commonalities between economics and biology, largely because I think explanations of specific phenomena often reduce to those stupid fucking natural history facts, I was struck by this argument by economist Samuel Bowles about the assumption of optimality in the supposed tradeoff between income equality and economic output (italics mine):
Theoryland may be the only place the "equality-efficiency trade-off" really works. Just to prove it wrong, Bowles charts the concept on a whiteboard at SFI.
The vertical axis is economic output. The…
razib | February 10, 2010By now, you probably know that there is a specter haunting Europe, and that specter is Argentina. Greece's debt crisis is putting the spotlight on the PIIGS nations of the Eurozone, Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain.
One thing to note is that besides mismanaging their fiscal situation, 4 of he 5 PIIGS are more ethical than the Swedes. Sweden's total fertility rate per woman is ~1.67.
Ireland = 1.85
Greece = 1.51
Spain = 1.39
Italy = 1.41
Portugal = 1.49
Ireland is the bad seed here, being profligate and unethical. The downside to being ethical is that it makes the welfare state…
cagapakis | February 10, 2010"The history of any given technology is extraordinarily complex."
--Rob Carlson, Biology is Technology.
Analyzing the history of a technology requires a complex look at the social, economic, and political context in which it emerged, and the reciprocal influences that the developing technology exerts on these factors. Predicting what the future of a technology will be like, how it will affect the economy and understanding the potential risks and payoffs is much much harder. Rob Carlson's new book, Biology is Technology: The Promise, Peril, and New Business of…
mikethemadbiologist | February 7, 2010If you're looking for a good primer on Big Shitpile and other recent economic events, I highly recommend Peter Goodman's Past Due: The End of Easy Money and the Renewal of the American Economy. It's well written, and does what many other books about the recent economic collapse fail to do: puts it into a larger context. But this small excerpt from Past Due hits the nail on the head as to what our problem is:
Washington has grown accustomed to muddy compromises that can be spun into clear-cut victories by both parties, as their leaders appear on Sunday television talk shows to argue over…
emjohnson | February 4, 2010
Harvard professor Lawrence Lessig has a new article in The Nation entitled "How to Get Our Democracy Back." In the piece he challenges both the Right and the Left on the ineffective means to create real change in this country. Attempts to shrink government by conservatives or to reform government by liberals have been useless because the underlining problem has not been addressed: the power of corporate lobbies that control policy.
In an earlier post (see: The Shadow of Scientific Opinion) I quoted the education reformer and philosopher John Dewey:
[P]olitics is the shadow cast on society…
razib | February 1, 2010I got the following chart from Wikipedia, and it suggests that on a per capita inflation-adjusted basis we're spending more on defense today than we were during the Reagan build-up, or Vietnam! Is this for real?
emjohnson | February 1, 2010 Image: Gideon Mendel / The GuardianJournalist William Fisher of the Inter Press Service News Agency has just used my recent work on Haiti for his story on the need for transparency and equality in the development aid that the West provides to Haiti:
Journalist Eric Michael Johnson, writing in The Huffington Post, notes that "Haiti has a historically unhealthy dependence on foreign commerce and finance, from the colonial days of the sugar trade to the current assistance provided by developed countries."
"Now the same politicians and financial elites that helped create this mess are…
razib | January 30, 2010Two interesting graphs from Calculated Risk. The first shows that the changes in GDP seem during the last recessive are on a par with those of the early 1980s and before (though we don't know if we're in a U or V shaped recession yet, though the odds are probably more U than V right now). But the second shows that in terms of employment we may be in uncharted territory, the worst of both worlds in terms of the jobless recoveries of the shallow recessions of the 1990s and early 2000s as well as the deep declines in employment of earlier recessions.
I've been hearing about the soon-to-come…
razib | January 29, 2010Jobless Turn to Family for Help, Often With Complications:
More than half of the respondents to a recent New York Times/CBS News poll of 708 unemployed adults nationwide said they had borrowed money from friends or relatives. In most cases, their financial pictures were bleak. Nearly 80 percent of those who reported borrowing money said their family's financial situation was "fairly bad" or "very bad," a significantly greater proportion than among those who had not had to borrow.
The numbers here might exaggerate the effect some, as an individual who is going through financial turmoil may…
mikethemadbiologist | January 29, 2010A very quick, nearly Twitter-esque point. Reading this post by Mike Stark about the Bernanke confirmation, it is remarkable (and disturbing) how few senators seem to realize where Bernanke stands on unemployment. What's worse is how far off the radar screen the Fed is for so many of the senators interviewed. If I were a senator, making sure as many of my constituents were employed would be my top priority (not only is it good policy, but it's good politics). The Fed plays a large role in that. The divorce between what affects the political prospects of senators and the lives of their…
mikethemadbiologist | January 29, 2010Sure, there were some nice parts in Obama's State of the Union speech. But this part is the equivalent of flat-eartherism and creationism (italics mine):
Starting in 2011, we are prepared to freeze government spending for three years. Spending related to our national security, Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security will not be affected. But all other discretionary government programs will. Like any cash-strapped family, we will work within a budget to invest in what we need and sacrifice what we don't. And if I have to enforce this discipline by veto, I will.
We will continue to go through…
stoat | January 28, 2010This was an ask stoat question, and probably a fairly easy one, so I'll have a go.
First of all, what is it? AF (ie, Airbo(u)rne Fraction, is the proportion of human emitted CO2 that stays in the atmosphere, the rest being sunk in land or ocean. Now it is important not to confuse the "proportion that stays in the atmosphere" with "the concentration in the atmosphere" otherwise you get silly little skeptics running around thinking that "airbourne fraction is constant" means that CO2 has stopped increasing. Sigh. However, I see that last time I looked at this I was having to slap down the…
emjohnson | January 28, 2010As I wrote yesterday in my piece for The Huffington Post, the history of Western financial involvement in Haiti has been one of growing the nation's textile industry despite the fact that 70% of Haiti's annual income comes from agriculture. By emphasizing programs such as HOPE and HOPE II, the United States has increased the profits of American companies, but the livelihood of Haitian workers has decreased at nearly the same rate.
[A] 2009 report by the Congressional Research Service found that "assessments of the effectiveness of Hope I, however, were disappointing." Since 2004 Haitian…
razib | January 27, 2010Mike the Mad Biologist points me to an interesting article in Wired, Uranium Is So Last Century -- Enter Thorium, the New Green Nuke. Of course Wired is a booster of many things which never take off, but in general I think it's probably safe to bet on nuclear power becoming more prominent in the near-to-medium-future. I recently have been reading a bit about oil, stuff that's not written by Daniel Yergen, and was fascinated by this chart of long term crude prices:
The inflation adjusted values are of interest. But look at the lack of volatility before 1974! My whole life has been…
mikethemadbiologist | January 20, 2010These will have to be some quick hits, since I'm at a meeting; I'll try to revisit them later this week:
1) The absolute numbers indicate that Democrats lost this election:
In 2008, Obama received 1,904,097 votes; in 2009, Coakley received 1,058,682.
In 2008, McCain received 1,108,854 votes; in 2009, Brown received 1,168,107 votes.
This is a massive defection by Democrats--it's nearly a 50% drop for Democrats versus the Republicans holding steady in absolute numbers. 20% of Obama voters crossed over to Brown.
2) Following on #1, the entire active rank-and-file warned the Democratic '…
razib | January 18, 2010Another idea, Professor Is a Label That Leans to the Left:
The overwhelmingly liberal tilt of university professors has been explained by everything from outright bias to higher I.Q. scores. Now new research suggests that critics may have been asking the wrong question. Instead of looking at why most professors are liberal, they should ask why so many liberals -- and so few conservatives -- want to be professors.
A pair of sociologists think they may have an answer: typecasting. Conjure up the classic image of a humanities or social sciences professor, the fields where the imbalance is…
mikethemadbiologist | January 18, 2010Image by Bettmann/CORBIS
With ten percent unemployment, and nearly eighteen percent underemployment--and much of the political establishment unconcerned about this--Martin Luther King's passion for economic justice sadly is still relevant. What is forgotten about Kings--often willfully--is that he was an advocate for racial and economic justice. From a speech he gave to striking sanitation workers in Memphis on March 18, 1968 (italics mine):
My dear friends, my dear friend James Lawson, and all of these dedicated and distinguished ministers of the Gospel assembled here tonight, to all of…
razib | January 16, 2010No Longer Their Golden Ticket:
In fact, "The Deep End" was conceived in 2007, that halcyon era of $160,000 starting salaries and full employment even for law grads who had scored in the 150s on their LSAT's.
Those days are over. As the profession lurches through its worst slump in decades, with jobs and bonuses cut and internal pressures to perform rising, associates do not just feel as if they are diving into the deep end, but rather, drowning.
Lawyers who entered the field as recently as a few years ago could reasonably expect a life of comfort, security and social esteem. Many are now…
mikethemadbiologist | January 16, 2010The Economist responds to economist Eugene Fama, who said:
I didn't renew my subscription to The Economist because they use the world bubble three times on every page.
The Economist:
Obviously, we are disappointed to have lost Mr Fama's business. But I can't say we regret the cause.
UPDATE: An Economist correspondent notes that as a die-hard believer in the Efficient Markets Hypothesis, Mr Fama is actually being quite rational in cancelling his subscription. As all publicly available information is already reflected in market prices, there's not much point in trying to learn anything from our…