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2. Krugman chooses the winning caption
3. An independent fiscal policy council?
4. Brad DeLong on Tyler and Mises
Posted by Tyler Cowen on December 3, 2008 at 06:20 PM in Web/Tech | Permalink
Comments
Winning caption #1 is very lame. I do not approve of Mr. Krugman's sense of humor.
Posted by: Mike at Dec 3, 2008 6:44:58 PM
Re: divorce calculator, I found a 4% chance, then put in my wife's stats and found a 7% chance.
Hm?
Also, when I clicked "female," a question about children came up that wasn't there for the male questions.
That's silly. I have consciously thought that I am much less likely to get divorced now that I have a child with my wife. Fear of losing my child would keep me from adultery where I might have given in before.
Posted by: Anderson at Dec 3, 2008 6:58:54 PM
You gotta be kidding me with that divorce calculator.
Posted by: David at Dec 3, 2008 7:01:14 PM
The independent fiscal policy council sounds great; I've been thinking along similar lines for a while. I bet voters would be in favor of it too. Obama's currently making some pretty technocratic picks, which is a good sign, but why not attempt to institutionalize technocracy as well?
The only obstacle that I can see is partisan interests that say "don't do the right thing, because we're in power now and we want to drink at the trough too!" But in the long run, rule by the corrupt and shiftless undermines democracy.
The interesting scenario is where popular opinion diverges from the technocratic consensus. I wonder how often voters really feel so strongly about their beliefs that they wouldn't tend to defer to the technocratic recommendations anyway, given a strong signal.
Posted by: mk at Dec 3, 2008 7:19:20 PM
I think the important question is what kind of ice cream will go in my light cone.
Posted by: j at Dec 3, 2008 7:22:14 PM
winning caption #1 is beyond me, but i really liked caption #2. very existential.
Posted by: raft at Dec 3, 2008 7:42:55 PM
and zen like.
Posted by: raft at Dec 3, 2008 7:43:21 PM
"a student of economics" is also an MR commenter. Shenanigans!
Posted by: josh at Dec 3, 2008 7:56:45 PM
A better divorce calculator already exists based on CDC outcomes, with a richer collection of demographic inputs.
I am an atheist with no desire for kids, so my probability of divorce after 20 years is 75%!
Add one kid on there to try and make it work and it's ... a 67% chance of divorce. Ooook.
BUT, if I bump my religiousness up to pope and add on 5 kids, my chance of divorce over 20 years drops to 5%.
So who says there's no hope?
Posted by: Jason Malloy at Dec 3, 2008 7:56:47 PM
I am an atheist with no desire for kids, so my probability of divorce after 20 years is 75%!
Urgh... someone warn Mr. Wilkinson pronto!!
Posted by: Jason Malloy at Dec 3, 2008 8:13:27 PM
Referring to yourself in the third-person now, Mr. Cowen? I always keep thinking that I'm seeing the height of your ego, but I never fail to find an even better example of your being full of it.
Posted by: Mark at Dec 3, 2008 8:37:02 PM
My favorite caption was one of the first suggested on Freakonomics by "Jason":
"Hey Beardie, I hear you write for the NY Times. Do you know this a-hole Krugman who is always writing about me?"
Posted by: Ricardo at Dec 3, 2008 8:37:16 PM
I'm glad I never had a professor such as Mr. DeLong when I was in graduate school else I never would have finished my degree in economics. I would have left in disgust at the lack of intellectual rigor.
Sneering. Name calling. But no actual attempt to refute anything that was quoted. We are just supposed to trust his expertise, I guess.
If this is what passes for economics education at one of the nation's better university's, I'm glad I attended a lowly big state university
Posted by: Mike at Dec 3, 2008 9:28:29 PM
Jason Malloy - thanks for the plug! Just one thing - you're misinterpreting those results a bit. It's not just divorce that affects whether a marriage survives - the odds are also affected by whether the spouses themselves survive! The tipoff that more than just divorce is involved are the CDC statistics Garth used to build his highly simplified statistical approximation [CDC = Centers for Disease Control]!
Posted by: Ironman at Dec 3, 2008 10:25:38 PM
How about a divorce calculator for unmarried people? Seems to me once you're married the info has lost its value.
Posted by: emerson at Dec 4, 2008 2:07:25 AM
#2: "Hey Paul, did you hear about how Tyler Cowen's blog comments just mysteriously stopped working. Call me."
#4: So, just for giggles, had we no fractional reserve banking, could we have had the current crisis?
With all the people conveniently screaming "regulation!" now, I'll just throw that out there as unlikely to happen, but sure to fix the problem, whereas wise regulation is unlikely to happen, and not sure to fix the problem. It's not clear to me which would hamstring growth more.
DeLong is dismissive because it's okay to be so. (A) The dude's dead and not on any committees. (B) It's apparently cool in the elite ranks to diss anything Gold-related.
When he says something like:
"read through the defenses of the gold standard as the only monetary system consistent with representative government, the attacks on Keynes, the attacks on the New Deal, the attacks on the United Nations, the blaming of all unemployment on labor unions--or on governments--the attacks on private-sector fractional-reserve banking, and stop with the attacks on all other believers in the gold standard not named "von Mises", not dedicated to the root-and-branch elimination of all forms of private fractional-reserve banking,"
He's writing to his own sympathizers, because he doesn't seem to realize there are people reading him who don't consider it blasphemy to criticize his esteemed institutions. And as for Mises criticism of those who tolerate fractional reserve banking, if you think something should be completely done away with and someone else thinks it should be mildly reduced, aren't you going to say, "no it should be completely done away with" Of course, an academic would.
What, exactly, is in error in writing such as this?
"What the foes of the gold standard are asking for is... to intensify very considerably the already-prevailing upward trend of prices and wages.... Such a policy of radical inflationism is, of course, extremely popular"
Do we have inflation? Of course. Slow, steady, predictable inflation may be better than insane, wildly fluctuating inflation, but it may be worse than slower, steadier, more predictable inflation.
We have relatively low inflation because The Fed does an okay job RELATIVE to other countries. I doubt this has always been the case. An economy that limps along is not proof that it cannot be improved. I wonder if people like DeLong think to themselves "If our current system wasn't 'bout right, we would have an economic collapse. Since we don't have a collapse, our social-democratic mix is 'bout right, although some European countries have it 'bout righter."
They seem to attack people like Mises for their tone and style, not realizing they haven't addressed the issues, and not realizing they have the same tone and style.
Posted by: Andrew at Dec 4, 2008 7:11:33 AM
I'm no fan of BD by any stretch, but perhaps he and other critics of Mises and company have the same tone and style for the same reason it's "cool for elitists" to bash gold bugs: Maybe there's a good reason. And the shrill nature of these people (one of the reasons I dislike BD, by the way) whenever anyone has the misfortune of falling under their gaze certainly doesn't win them any friends. They're, again, shrill. Accusatory. Denigrating of others intellectually and essentially morally. They're profoundly arrogant, always able to identify the problem with certainty but never in a position to try to do anything about it (because the world is keeping them down), and they always saw it coming after the fact. Now, none of this is unique to their bunch, but they seem to have it in broader and deeper quantities, and they serve it all up with unveiled self-righteous anger.
Sometimes "manner" does count.
Posted by: MM at Dec 4, 2008 2:05:17 PM
I entered my info: 6% chance of divorce in next five years. I entered my wife's info: 4% chance of divorce in next five years. Question: does running it with my wife's info give me any more information?
Posted by: Kevin Postlewaite at Dec 4, 2008 3:25:00 PM
Per his usual behavior, DeLong deletes any substantive arguments that take issue with his positions. DeLong is the biggest coward in the field of economics.
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Is it realistic some of these books?
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It is enlightening!
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