SA pigeon ‘faster than broadband’ BBC (hat tip reader Michael)
MIT Students Take Pictures from Space on $150 Budget iReport
Quick Note on Confidence Tim Duy
Dame Vera Lynn becomes oldest living artist to have number one album Telegraph
Lending in Europe continues to shrink Financial Times
Towards a better measure of well-being Joseph Stiglitz, Financial Times
BIS Advises Higher Taxes For Big Banks Wall Street Journal
Gender, risk, and competition Alison Booth, VoxEU
House prices will take five years to return Times Online
Antidote du jour:
http://vpizza.org/~jmeehan/balloon/
He did this in 2002 and he is not even a MIT student.
Regarding the Stiglitz article. This is the first time in 3-4 years i’ve seen the term “well-being” used in a conversation about economics. Of course it’s probably going on all the time, just not at the level of the media and most popular blogs. I looked into this last year to see who was dealing with what I called “quality of life.” Not sure how it differs. What I found then, was this:
http://www.cambridgewellbeing.org/people.html
They don’t seem too active. The last news they posted on the site was from back in May 2008. Let’s hope the French care a little more about it than the English (In Vino Felicitas)
The still-active field known as welfare economics has been the arena for discussions on such matters. I don’t know whether the Cambridge institute at your link means to be pursuing anything different —maybe they’re making more explicit an alliance with psychology.
The last economist to get a Nobel whose primary area is welfare economics was Amartya Sen (1998; aricle has a partial citation list). An earlier article of his that sounds relevant today is Rational Fools: A Critique of the Behavioral Foundations of Economic Theory, Philosophy and Public Affairs, Vol. 6, No. 4 (Summer, 1977), pp. 317-344. Abstract:
18 miles is not “space” (usually 62++ miles). Sigh. So many things wrong with this.
“Banks across Europe have insisted in recent months any decline in lending is due to a fall-off in demand, not supply. ”
Balance sheet recession coming…..?
http://csis.org/files/media/csis/events/081029_japan_koo.pdf
Another sign of wilting green shoots.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/moslive/article-1212013/Revealed-The-ghost-fleet-recession.html
Making quality of life part of economics may be a revolutionary idea but you certainly can see it socially going back to labor movements and socialist clubs in the 19th century, the Founders and Framers before that, and in philosophy for a couple of thousand years. Shouldn’t we be asking how dumb economics has been for not including this for so long?