John Lorinc profiles Mark Carney, the governor of the Central Bank of Canada. While the rest of the developing world’s banks are on life support, Lorinc writes that Canada’s financial system “has sailed through this crisis with its international reputation almost unscathed.” Carney is also a vocal advocate for increased regulation of the financial sector and is one of the primary architects of the G20’s regulatory reforms.
In a Washington Post op-ed, Bernd Beber and Alexandra Scacco claim that the truth lies in the digits of the vote count. Humans are bad at making up fraudulent numbers, they write, and the fact that the vote counts for the different provinces contain “too many 7’s and not enough 5’s in the last digit” and not enough non-adjacent digits points to made-up numbers.
Can industrialized nations save the world with a plan to offset their carbon emissions by paying developing nations to stop cutting down their forests? Can eco-conscious photographer Yann Arthus-Bertrand offset his carbon emissions by killing a Frenchman? Do carbon offsets even work at all?
Many readers of this blog are well familiar with Austan Goolsbee, a colleague of Levitt’s at the University of Chicago who is currently serving in Washington on the Council of Economic Advisers and as chief economist for the president’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board. He is (in no particular order): brainy, talkative, excitable, and fully engaged in just about any modern economic issue worth considering, including the budget, the tax code, the auto industry, the bailouts, and on and on.
Usually, your goal in The Sims 3 is to create a character and have it live out a pleasant, socially successful life in a well-appointed home. Robin Burkinshaw‘s Sims live in a weedy park at the center of town, broke, friendless, and looking for love. Burkinshaw chronicles the lives of this homeless family on a highly readable blog.
The average job-seeker takes 12 weeks to find work. TIME profiles one laid-off software architect who used social networks including Facebook and Twitter to land a job in just 11 days. Will the recovery favor the internet-savvy in other fields as well? (Or: maybe this guy was just a super employee who, if he hadn’t been wasting his time tweeting, would have found a job in 10 days?)
A study by evolutionary psychologist William Lassek has concluded, perhaps not surprisingly, that the more muscular a man is, the more sexual partners he has. So why haven’t skinny, fat, or average men been wiped out of the gene pool? One reason, according to Lassek, is that men with bigger muscles have to eat more to sustain themselves and have . . .
Joseph Stiglitz reflects on the consequences of the economic crisis for market economies and democracy in developing countries, where the jury is still out on these institutions. “Many countries may conclude not simply that unfettered capitalism, American-style, has failed,” he writes, “but that the very concept of a market economy has failed, and is indeed unworkable under any circumstances.” [%comments]
Conor Clarke interviews Paul Samuelson, a recipient of both the John Bates Clark medal and a Nobel prize. Samuelson, age 94, discusses the history of Keynesian economics, his relationships with Milton Friedman, Alan Greenspan, and Larry Summers, as well as the current stimulus debate. Part two of the interview appears here. [%comments]
The New England Journal of Medicine‘s Image Challenge: sort of like the New Yorker‘s caption contest if it were multiple choice and featured only unsettling medical photographs that needed on-the-spot diagnoses. [%comments]
You know those strange traffic jams that appear to come out of nowhere, with nothing causing them, and then suddenly end? As Wired reports , a team of M.I.T. mathematicians calls them “phantom jams” or “jamitons,” and has found mathematical equations to describe them, similar to those that describe detonation waves from explosions. Phantom jams, the mathematicians found, can form when a single driver slows down (to take a sip of coffee or talk on the phone) on a road with too many cars on it. They hope the new equations will lead to roads engineered to keep traffic below the density where a jamiton can form.
Draw a picture of the sun. If you’re like us, you probably have to fight the urge to add a smiley face to it. That’s a cognitive leftover from our childhood: young children almost always add smiley faces to sun drawings, and believe that the sun benignly follows them around. It turns out that this same tendency, to assign agency to patterns and objects beyond our control, also drives conspiracy theorizing among adults.
We found our cat Zach at the beach as a tiny kitten, hungry and flea-ridden. We brought him, four kids in tow, to the anti-cruelty society (which we now refer to simply as the “cruelty society”), but they told us that he would almost certainly be put to death if we left him. Not quite ready to give that life lesson to the kids, we let him join our family, and he has been a model citizen ever since.
Until recently. After a year, he suddenly stopped using the litter box, preferring instead rugs and piles of our clothes. So Jeannette took him to the local vet, who advised the following plan of action:
Germans may soon be able to purchase gold in vending machines at the country’s airports and rail stations. It is said that the machines will charge a 30 percent premium (!) and prices will be updated every few minutes. Gold has generated significant investor attention, particularly in Germany, since the financial crisis hit.
Biologist Robert Full thought he was just teaching a bunch of engineers how gecko feet work so they could build a wall-climbing robot. Then the engineers reported back something strange. Their prototype didn’t work unless they gave it a tail. Then they asked Full a pretty straightforward question: what are gecko tails for, anyway? To Full’s surprise, he wasn’t quite sure, so he set out to investigate gecko tails, and discovered an entire universe of surprises, which he describes in this TED talk.
Although the 2009 hurricane season has opened with a whisper this month, the Gulf Coast is particularly vulnerable to storm damage. Why? The recession has left the region littered with thousands of foreclosed homes. With nobody around to secure them before a hurricane hits, these houses could break apart under heavy winds, pelting neighboring homes with debris. One possible solution under consideration: turn the foreclosed homes into hurricane shelters.
I just caught this (with a Tivo-induced lag) — Austan Goolsbee on Monday’s Colbert Report:
A new working paper by Seema Jayachandran and Ilyana Kuziemko offers another explanation for the “missing girls” phenomenon observed in some developing countries. Breast-feeding both improves health outcomes and temporarily decreases fertility. Jayachandran and Kuziemko argue that women with a preference for male children may wean daughters earlier in the hopes of restoring their fertility and conceiving a son, resulting in worse health outcomes for girls. The authors find that daughters are weaned sooner than sons and conclude that the breastfeeding factor explains 14 percent of India’s missing girls.
Last week, Israel’s oldest newspaper, Haaretz, took a one-off chance, temporarily replacing its workaday reporters with 31 of the country’s leading poets and authors. The writers, as writers do, ran amok. They filed epic front-page news reports on daily life in the first person; ruminated about childhood in an interview with the country’s defense minister; and delivered the weather report as a sonnet. The market report, written by a celebrated children’s book author, read like a fairy tale: “Everything’s okay. Everything’s like usual. Yesterday trading ended. Everything’s okay. The economists went to their homes, the laundry is drying on the lines, dinners are waiting in place … Dow Jones traded steadily and closed with 8,761 points, Nasdaq added 0.9 percent to a level of 1,860 points …”
Soul searching continues among macroeconomists who failed to predict the economic crisis. One culprit behind the great macro-flub: the “Control Illusion,” in which economists are blinkered by overconfidence in computer models just because they, as Levitt recently wrote, “solve a problem that is really, really hard mathematically.”
An Economist article discusses how simple maps have become one of the most powerful tools that interest groups use to promote their causes. The Grim Reaper’s Roadmap, for instance, maps out mortality rates in Britain from different causes in hopes of sparking investigations. Ushahidi.com, by mapping instances of violence in Kenya, wants to hold the government accountable. And MAPlight maps political donations to show how money influences congressional votes.
George Foreman named all five of his boys after himself, but only one has taken up pro boxing. I met the retired boxer and “grillionaire” at his son’s pro debut last Saturday. George III won, but in a bout that some say looked rather unevenly matched.
What happens when a lot of people get upset about copyright laws? In Sweden, the Pirate Party gets a seat at the European Parliament. As the Guardian reports,”revulsion” over a controversial I.P. enforcement directive and the arrest of The Pirate Bay’s owners helped the Pirate Party secure 7 percent of the national vote. Another Pirate Party won nearly 1 percent of the vote in Germany, and similar parties exist in Austria, Spain, Denmark, Poland, and Finland. It may be a good thing that Dubner’s new term for internet piracy didn’t catch on. The Downlifting Party just doesn’t sound as appealing.
Yes, we already know the facts — income inequality has been increasing since the 1970’s. But it can be easy to lose sight of just how important this has been. This presentation of the data — by Claudia Goldin and my former thesis advisor Larry Katz, really hits home:
Treasury Secretary Geithner‘s fears about unemployment appear to be disappearing fast. Or at least his personal fears. According to the prediction markets at Intrade.com, the chances that he departs his post this year have declined from a high above 40 percent to around 10 percent.
Seven years from now, a new study reports, your friend group will probably look entirely different, even though it’ll still be the same size. Utrecht University sociologist Gerald Mollenhorst surveyed 604 people about their friends and again seven years later, and found that only 48 percent of people’s original friends were still part of their network after that time period. How will social networking tools like Facebook and Twitter affect the rate of friend turnover in the next seven years?
American and international health insurers hold $4.5 billion worth of stock in tobacco companies, a new study published in the New England Journal of Medicine finds. The study’s co-author says the stock holdings represent a conflict of interest: “If you own a billion dollars [of tobacco stock], then you don’t want to see it go down…. You are less likely to join anti-tobacco coalitions, endorse anti-tobacco legislation, basically, anything most health companies would want to participate in.”
Expected consequence of the mortgage crisis: fewer Americans want second homes. Unexpected consequence: Fewer American state legislatures want second houses.
Many improvements in technology shift the production possibility frontier outward. Many of these increase human happiness, and a few do this by increasing marital harmony (Viagra?).
One piece of technology my wife and I just acquired does all of these while saving that most precious of all things — time:
For years, colleges have treated their students as consumers, building ever more elaborate facilities and hiring ever more dazzling star scholars to lure applicants. They did this regardless of how high these investments drove tuition, since easy credit meant families could stretch to cover the costs. But with the credit crisis comes signs that the college bubble is bursting, as “consumers who have questioned whether it is worth spending $1,000 a square foot for a home are now asking whether it is worth spending $1,000 a week to send their kids to college,” the Chronicle of Higher Education suggests.
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