Marginal Revolution

Wolf on the Global Economy

Brad Setser points to Martin Wolf's extensive powerpoint slides on the global economy.

• The first set covers financial flows to emerging economies and the crises of the past few years.
• The second covers emerging market (and central) financing of the US current account deficit and the global savings glut/ investment drought.
• The third covers Martin Wolf's policy recommendations - his suggests for changing the international financial system. 

How to fight corruption

Football referees in Nigeria can take bribes from clubs but should not allow them to influence their decisions on the pitch, a football official said on Friday.

Fanny Amun, acting Secretary-General of the Nigerian Football Association, said bribery was common in the Nigerian game.

"We know match officials are offered money or anything to influence matches and they can accept it," Amun told Reuters on Friday...

"Referees should only pretend to fall for the bait, but make sure the result doesn't favour those offering the bribe," Amun said.

Here is the full story, and thanks to David (not Tom) Williamson for the pointer.

The gap gets smaller

Prayer doesn't reduce mortality and neither does alcohol.  In both cases, more evidence that there is no god.

How to cook blackened fish

Grind fresh white pepper and black pepper in equal parts, and add about three times as much red chili powder, alternatively red cayenne pepper.  Put in fresh thyme, basil, and oregano, each in parts roughly equal to the white or black pepper.  Pour melted butter over your uncooked fish.  Rub in the spices.  Cook the fish rapidly over high heat, as high as you can manage, in butter, hoping to create a crust by searing the spices.  It is yummy even if you fail to create the crust, squeeze on lemon at the end.

It is not just ports

Over in Dubai, they have suddenly realized they are in the Final Four.

An underlying tension in libertarianism

On the one hand, [Charles] Murray says he wants to liberate citizens from the welfare state so they can live life however they choose. On the other hand, by liberating citizens from the welfare state, he hopes to force them back into lives of traditional bourgeois virtue.

Read more here.  Many Swedes, of course, consider themselves highly individualistic, precisely for this reason.

Thanks to www.politicaltheory.info for the pointer.

The limitations of welfare economics

Here is yours truly again, from his latest book.  I tried to condense the limits of welfare economics into a few simple sentences; here is what I came up with:

On the negative side, the economic approach considers only a limited range of values, namely those embodied in individual preferences and expressed in terms of willingness to pay. This postulate is self-evident to many economists, but it fails to command wider assent. It wishes to erect “satisfying a preference” as an independent ethical value, but is unwilling to consider any possible competing values, apart from preferences. It is hard to see why non-preference values should not be admitted to a broader decision calculus.

Typically economists retreat to their intuition that satisfying preferences is somehow "real," and that pursuing non-preference values is religious, mystical, or paternalistic. The rest of the world, however, has not found this distinction persuasive. They do not see why satisfying preferences should be a value of special and sole importance, especially when those same preferences may be ill-informed, inconsistent, malicious, or spiteful. The decisions to count all preferences, to use money as the measuring rod, and to weight all market demands equally must themselves rely on external ethical judgments. For that reason, the economist has no a priori means of dismissing non-preference values from the overall policy evaluation.

Strategies for breaking droughts

The still under-valued Megan (non-McArdle) writes:

Moving on, Sean asked me how I flirt with the guys I like. “Well, you know how I am usually friendly and smiley and I talk about dorky things? Just like that, only more.” “So if you saw a guy you liked…” “I would probably give him a hug like everyone else, and then tell him about the things I’ve been thinking about recently. Like right now I’m super into Geoffrey Chaucer’s blog, so I would be all ‘hah, hah, hah, and then, he makes fun of John Gower, hah hah’.”    “And you still don’t score?” said Sean.  “Remarkable.”

Here is the full and articulate post.  Here are the writer's two (false) premonitions.  Here is some background on the competition.  Here is the author.  Please restrict your thoughts to the polite, and apply game theory if at all possible.

New AEI-Brookings book on information markets

The whole thing is on-line.

New Orleans

What is less stirring than expected: The physical devastation of buildings and infrastructure, and yes I have driven around the bad parts.

What is more stirring than expected: The sheer emptiness of so many parts of the city.