Paul Collier, an award-winning Oxford University economist, is a self-described Africanist who researches the effects of civil war, aid, and the “problems of democracy” in societies that have lots of resources but low incomes.
| While A.I.G. continues to dominate the news, it’s worth reading this 2002 Economist article, which cast doubt on the insurance giant’s early forays into the derivatives market. Back then, A.I.G. argued that “derivatives play an important part in reducing the company’s overall risk.” By 2009, those same investments had left the company so badly damaged that it posed a . . .
As noted here earlier, this recession (depression? repression?) is inspiring some pretty decent pop music. I think the apex has been reached. Listen for yourself to “Hey, Paul Krugman,” by Jonathan Mann: It’s a pretty great song, and not just because of the lyrics:
| He didn’t announce it via cake, but Doug Bowman quit his job as head of Google’s visual design team last week, citing the company’s “reliance on data” for design decisions as the main reason for his departure. Bowman writes on his blog that he’ll miss Google’s “incredibly smart and talented people” and the “occasional massage,” but not “a design . . .
he Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas boasts the Moorea Club, which it advertises as offering a European-style beach, with entry limited to ages 21 and over.
It does not advertise that the price of day use is $50 for male customers and $10 for female customers. While examples of price discrimination are ubiquitous, this is one of the purest examples of demand-based price discrimination. The service the club offers is the same to men and women: a place in the sun, which is equally costly to the club, regardless of the patron’s gender.
| The proprietors of the Name of the Year contest “can’t imagine topping last year’s death struggle between Destiny Frankenstein and Spaceman Africa.” But these are hopeful times. They’ve collected and verified 64 of the weirdest names they could find. They’re now taking your votes for a winner. (HT: MJS) [%comments]
I was recently reading a famous old economics paper called “The Fable of the Bees,” by Steven N.S. Cheung. In a footnote, Cheung writes one of the most wonderful sentences I’ve read in a long time: Facts, like jade, are not only costly to obtain but also difficult to authenticate. From what I can tell — hey, I’m no Fred . . .
| Why write a college term paper when you can pay $20 for someone in Nigeria, Ukraine, or — well, O.K., Texas to do it for you? The Chronicle of Higher Education took a look at a leading essay mill with international ties. Says one writer-for-hire: “I took [an assignment] on Christological topics in the second and third centuries. I . . .
When Bernie Madoff turned himself in, his firm owed investors $65 billion, but had only about a billion dollars on hand. Never before have we seen anything close to a $64 billion fraud. But in an important sense, the unprecedented vastness of Bernie Madoff’s fraud is a good thing. “If I hadn’t invested in Madoff, I would have ended up . . .
| A shop owner in England is tackling the litter problem in her neighborhood by marking sweets wrappers and drink bottles with the names of the children buying them. This way, she tells the BBC, she can easily identify and reprimand litter “offenders.” Waste-personalization is hardly a novel ideal; it’s been done before (to Dubner’s delight) with dog poo. Perhaps . . .
For the last few years, Time magazine has compiled a list of the 100 people who “shape our world.” In the past, they’ve made some pretty questionable choices. Economists have not figured very prominently on the previous lists; there has been roughly one economist in the top 100 per year, including people like Jeff Sachs and Larry Summers. This year, . . .
| Does the 3,250th review of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows have any influence on an Amazon customer? An Economist article says it does. In fact, says the article, the more online reviews a product has, the more likely people are to buy it. If reviewers know the reviews they write have influence, it may help answer Levitt’s earlier . . .
Here’s a website worth checking out if you own a good pair of shoes and don’t mind using them once in a while. It’s called Walk Score and it gauges the pedestrian-friendliness of locations. Type in any address or pair of cross streets in the U.S. (or Europe for that matter), and the site maps the area and plots the nearby recreational, commercial, cultural, and social amenities. Even better, for the quantitatively inclined, it assigns each location a walk score on a 0 to 100 scale.
Blog reader Dan Ciruli emailed us this photo from a California cemetery as another candidate for a recession magazine cover: Dan Ciruli It may be prematurely optimistic, but after last week, should it look more like this? If you have a Freak-worthy photo of your own, send it along here.
The first sign of middle age has hit home with my wife: she can no longer read small print up close and has to resort to the “reach,” where she extends her arm as far as she can to read books. That same fate probably soon awaits me as well, which makes me glad I am not Thai. I’ve never . . .
| When Stephen Colbert promised to lead an angry, pitchfork-wielding mob to A.I.G. headquarters last week, he was joking. The actual angry mob that stood outside A.I.G. headquarters yesterday chanting “shame on you” wasn’t. Nor are the literally bus-loads of protesters scheduled to visit A.I.G. executives’ homes in Connecticut this weekend. No wonder the company has issued a security memo . . .
Reading about the sad and sudden death of the actress Natasha Richardson, I’ve come to wonder if perhaps, in some small part, she died not in spite of her fame but rather because of it.
| Say you’ve just bought a new suit to spruce yourself up on the job. The next morning, your boss calls you into his office, compliments you on your fashionable duds, and with a heavy heart, lays you off. To address this very situation, the Jos. A. Bank menswear chain is running a “Risk Free Suit” promotion. Buy a suit . . .
Nine weeks ago, I invited readers to submit quotations for which they wanted me to try to trace the origins, using The Yale Book of Quotations and more recent research by me. Scores of people have responded via comments or e-mails. I am responding as best I can, one or two per week. Debi asked: I have the following quote . . .
Susanne Freidberg is a professor of geography at Dartmouth and author of the forthcoming book “Fresh: A Perishable History.” She is writing some guest posts here about food; you can find her first one, and a brief Q&A with Freidberg, here. The International Boston Seafood Show may be one of the few trade shows where lunch really is worth the . . .
| Can sound waves win the war on drugs? The Sound Advice Project, an anti-drug campaign, lets parents record a six-second message of support for their kids, then mails them a 3D plastic representation of the recording’s unique waveform for their kid to wear as a bracelet. It’s a cool commitment device, but also a cool birthday gift to a . . .
I spent 40 minutes waiting to begin diagnostic tests preparatory to seeing my ophthalmologist. What a waste of my valuable time! And my calculations from data from the American Time Use Survey suggest that this is a standard problem: the average adult American spends four hours per year waiting for medical or dental care, with each wait averaging around 45 . . .
| We reported a while back that the true private mortality cost of smoking a pack of cigarettes is close to $222. It turns out smoking has a serious environmental impact as well. Assuming all 5.5 trillion cigarettes produced around the world each year get smoked, smokers produce 84,878 tons of particulate air pollution annually — about half the pollution . . .
Courtesy of Greg Mankiw‘s blog, here is a link to Ed Glaeser‘s interesting critique of the Dr. Seuss story The Lorax on the New York Times‘s Economix blog.
Here are two interesting follow-ups to Tuesday’s post, in which I described how basketball teams who are behind at half-time fare a bit better than might be expected. First, my friend Lionel Page points me to a related study of his, which analyzes tennis. Lionel uses a similar approach to arrive at a different conclusion, but I think his results . . .
| When entering your office pool this season, check out the collective wisdom on winners and losers, then bet against it. Slate‘s Chris Wilson explains. [%comments]
Last fall, I spoke at an SPSS conference in Las Vegas. As I was heading home, I saw a sign on a convenience store (right next to Bally’s) that made me do a double-take. I got so interested that after a couple of blocks, I convinced my driver to turn around and let me go back to take these pictures: . . .
O.K., I’ll admit that I’ve done plenty of hand-wringing about the state of economics. And now I’m going to do something about it. This morning, Brookings announced that David Romer and I will be taking over as the new editors of the Brookings Papers on Economic Activity. We’ve got some pretty big shoes to fill — left empty by Larry . . .
| During the boom economy, we took on historically unprecedented debt to finance our pursuit of the American Dream, all the while losing faith that we could achieve it. Now that the Wall Street party is over, we’re starting to dream anew. Vanity Fair contributing editor David Kamp has more, in an essay accompanied by some stunning photos of American . . .
Dear Secretary Geithner, I’ve been out of touch. Sorry. I spent the last month on grand jury duty, putting Manhattan’s poor minorities behind bars. I needed a little time to recover. As promised, this is the first in a series of friendly dispatches. Advice, if you will. Learned counsel. Wisdom from the streets (as opposed to “The Street,” where wisdom . . .