Day: May 28, 2005
Second helpings
After only six days, Sith is already the highest-grossing movie of 2005. Here is a guide to what to look for on your second viewing. Tickets permitting, I’ll be there tonight.
Krugman has a Hangover
Brad DeLong gives a nice overview of Austrian business cycle theory and points out (correctly) that in recent columns Paul Krugman has put forward a variant of the theory. (Krugman has also done this before in explaining the recession of 2001.) All of this is most puzzling since Krugman also wrote a famously nasty attack on Hayekian/Hangover business cycle theory calling it "about as worthy of serious study as the phlogiston theory of fire."
Usually I find books like this only in my dreams
Fischer Black and the Revolutionary Idea of Finance, by Perry Mehrling.
Fischer Black spanned the worlds of academia and finance. His formula for the pricing of options remains essential on Wall Street. His macroeconomic theories — which claim money does not matter, not even for the price level (more on this soon) — are still regarded as crazy. His personal life sounds like that of a high-functioning Asperger’s:
He did almost all of his work in an outlining program called ThinkTank, which he used as a kind of external associative emmory to supplement his own. Everything he read, every conversation he had, every thought that occurred, everything got summarized and added to the data base that swelled eventually to 20 million bytes organized in 2000 alphabetical files…Reading, discussion and thinking that Fischer did outside the office was recorded on slips to paper to be entered into the database later. Reading, discussion, and thinking that took place inside the office was recorded directly. While he was on the phone, he was typing. While he was talking to you in person, he was typing. Sometimes he even typed while he was interviewing a prospective job candidate, looking at the screen not the candidate.
Robert Skidelsky and Sylvia Nasar raised the bar for economic biographies some time ago. This book is the next step in that chain. Pre-order it here, in the meantime here is a Perry Mehrling paper "Understanding Fischer Black."
Music I love in genres I hate
Heavy metal – Ugh, right? Well, the good stuff, such as Led Zeppelin, gets defined as classic rock instead of metal. I dislike "metal-as-we-know-it," but nonetheless I am struck by Mastodon’s Leviathan. Metal’s dirty little secret is just how much it can resemble free jazz. Add to the mix a retelling of America’s greatest novel (Moby Dick), a feel for the apocalyptic, a tasteful switch to the acoustic, and you have an album to come back to. Even the eggheads at The New York Times pushed this one.
Post-1965 Country music – You can argue about that date, but New Jersey boys aren’t going to like Garth Brooks or Shania Twain. Shelby Lynne, on the other hand, is the best of Loretta Lynn and Dusty Springfield rolled into one, only circa 2005. I am Shelby Lynne is the breakthrough album and probably her best work. Identity Crisis is a worthy follow-up, and the excellent Suit Yourself just came out this week.