Many years ago, I had a Cultural Anthropology professor who discussed the glories of the mechanical cherry-picker. The only catch was that (1) it had upfront and maintenance costs and (2) it performs less well than experienced cherry-pickers. In short, it would be useful if you have a shortage of labor and an excess of […]

We try to pretend we’re not actually human sometimes. And sometimes we have to decide not to pretend. Many of the Life Cycle Theory models for economics assume limited borrowing constraints: you can’t borrow more than you will make (present valued), but you can borrow on future earnings. You can only do that for so […]

My aging Subaru had a problem a while back. Leak of transmission fluid; a seal or another failing, leading to steady dripping out. And with little need to open the hood, no gauge—or even an “idiot light”—on the dashboard, it dripped for quite a while. And then some. The first repair—call it Quizzical Effort 1—refilled […]

One of the best rules in mathematics is that, to determine the value of all the variables, you need only as many distinct equations as you have variables. (previous sentence edited for clarity.) So let’s combine a couple of recent articles (h/t Mark Thoma for the first, Digby for the second.) Richard Florida finds three […]

David Neiwert (h/t Rebecca Lesses) doesn’t quite get it right: There will be a lot of hand-wringing in the coming days over the shooting of Rep. Giffords this morning at a constituent event — some of it, almost certainly, from the folks at Fox, who will wonder aloud how this kind of thing could happen. […]

You could either be there live, or check out some of the papers here while enjoying a musical interlude with the most talented musician to come out of the California “soft rock” movement of the 1970s: Or the most talented member of the Velvet Underground: Or this giggle: Or just treat this as a prelude […]

As the CUTGO Congress attempts to return to the spending ways of 2001-2008, the parallels grow clearer. A simple table to allow easy comparison of the major initiatives of 2001 and 2011 is presented below.

The Reserve Bank of New Zealand released a paper by Nicolas Groshenny last month—I’m behind on planning for Chanukkah; that I got to a paper from New Zealand about U.S. monetary policy this soon is, er, probably one of the reasons why—in which he evaluates the counterfactual of following the “Taylor Rule” from 2002 to […]

Bruce has made this point repeatedly. Dr. Black puts it in more direct language: [I]nevitably the Social Security Trustees will, perfectly justifiably, tweak a few assumptions about future economic activity so that there will be a DOOM scenario, an EVERYTHING’S AWESOME scenario, and a “uh oh maybe in about 40 years we will have a […]

I try not to pay attention—and not provide a direct link—to the NYT’s Stupidest Conservative. It’s one of the greatest advantages of having Susan of Texas around: you can go there and see anything I might write, done better, and (in this case) with cute graphics. But when Brad DeLong falls down on the job—dealing […]