I believe in synchronicity, so I found it noteworthy that I came across two articles that gave great prominence to the issue of values, one Jeremy Grantham’s April newsletter, “Immoral Hazard,” the other a post by Willem Buiter on, of all things, the Olympics. Grantham’s excellent piece is unfortunately too long to present in full; […]
Read more...Well, Buiter did not go quite as far as I suggested in the headline. He recommended a 1500 year pause. This post made me realize why I have a certain fondness for Buiter. It’s not that I agree with his argument (I hate to confess, I have come to be completely bored by the event, […]
Read more...A Washington Post article, “From DNA of Family, a Tool to Make Arrests,” points to the increasing efforts to look for partial matches in DNA databases that might implicate close relatives. This is a disturbing development, since DNA, like other forensic evidence, isn’t as foolproof as its image in the popular imagination indicates. There have […]
Read more...Food shortages have gotten an uptick in press coverage in the last two days due to a G7 pronouncement that was curiously interpreted differently by the New York Times and the Financial Times. First, the NY Times: The world’s economic ministers declared on Sunday that shortages and skyrocketing prices for food posed a potentially greater […]
Read more...It’s no surprise to anyone in America that being middle class isn’t what it used to be. Even though we have more gadgets, middle class workers in the 1950s and 1960s could afford to have stay-at-home wives. For mort households, it takes more hours of paid labor, and more borrowing, to support a bourgeois lifestyle. […]
Read more...One of the hobbyhorses of the rational-choice economics types is that voting is irrational. The odds of your vote making a difference are ludicrously small, so why bother? Readers may recall that the New York Times picked up on the argument by Lloyd Cohen of George Mason Univerisity that, contrary to widely held views, buying […]
Read more...Bloomberg had a odd article on the varying fortunes of Harvard MBAs (and some alumni of other Harvard graduate programs). It duly notes that they range from unquestioned successes like Lou Gerstner to more controversial figures, such as Jeff Skilling, Paul Bilzerian, Henry Paulson,, Stan O’Neal, and of course, George W. Bush Generalizing about HBS […]
Read more...A New York Times/CBS poll found Americans the most dissatisfied they have been about their country’s direction since 1992. And two things are particularly noteworthy about the survey. First is the unhappiness was as universal as you ever see in a large-scale study, cutting across party, gender, age, and geographic lines. The second is that […]
Read more...How dare the CEO of Wal-Mart, the company that makes such a studied practice of paying workers so badly that taxpayers subsidize its prices, say he and big business should influence health care policy? The US has the most costly healthcare in the world while failing to produce materially better results than countries with varying […]
Read more...Louis Uchitelle, in “Unsold Homes Tie Down Would-Be Transplants,” points out that being unable to sell a house can keep people from taking jobs that require them to move. That problem is obviously now more acute given the moribund state of the housing market in many parts of the county. However, Uchitelle implies that the […]
Read more...As readers may infer, this blog is not big on religion as a topic; it is way too fraught. Merely talking about money gets some people riled up. But whether you are religious, “spiritual” as Americans like to say, or a firm atheist, Willem Buiter’s post on sanctity (really, sanctimoniousness) is instructive. Buiter is Anglican, […]
Read more...Steve Waldman is on a roll. He has an excellent piece today arguing that despite contemporary notions otherwise, capitalism and character (meaning moral fiber) have not and need not be contradictory. Although Waldman makes a good case, the barriers to the return of character in commerce are more profound than he lets on. A colleague […]
Read more...Joseph Stiglitz gives the high point of the findings of his new book, The Three Trillion Dollar War, in a comment today in the Guardian. I wish Stiglitz has gone on at more length about the horrific corruption and featherbedding in the Iraq contracting process. All the traditional rules were thrown out the window. This […]
Read more...We have the specter of two CEOs, each heading a firm that is a leader in its businesses and a debt powerhouse, making close to polar opposite statements about the prospects for the credit markets. Lloyd Blankfein, Goldman’s chief, said today that the credit crisis was half to two thirds through its course. While there […]
Read more...Jeffrey Sachs, in an article for Project Syndicate (hat tip Mark Thoma), argues that private sector efforts alone won’t yield sufficient progress in achieving needed progress on the environmental and anti-poverty fronts. Part of this, of course, is the classic problem of externalities: carbon emissions are free to the perps, but impose costs on everyone. […]
Read more...