Felix Salmon is a very smart person who writes very well. Also he once invited me to an instant messenger debate that he posted on his high traffic blog. So I’d like to make only polite criticisms. However, I can’t write well so I will please translate the following to polite in your heads. Salmon […]

Robert Waldmann To obamanate V. To open an argument absurdly excessive concessions to one’s opponents. Obamanation gerund of To obamanate.Obamanation present participle of to obamanate. I offer this definition in defense of Obama. The word will be defined, and he’d better hope my definition is adopted.

Robert Waldmann So it turns out that extreme liberals have higher measured IQs than extreme conservatives and atheists have slightly higher IQs than biblical literalists. What does this tell us ? Matthew Yglesias sent me to this and I learned that people will not accept the fact that not all stochastic variables are normally distributed. […]

Robert Waldmann It’s alive update: Igor Volsky provides a good summary of the proposal As far as I can see the Snowe plan worst tax ever free rider provision to prevent employment of people who need jobs provision is included. I believe I am the first person to publicly object to this proposal when the […]

Leninism in the USAFirst let me define Leninism. To me the key feature of Leninism is that Lenin declared the party to be the highest good. Thus acts were to be judged as pro-party or anti-party. In fact the very same acts were good or bad depending on whether they were done by the party […]

What is a good approximation ?The word good is important but very general. One (long long ago) I pulled a hair out of my scalp and told Elisabetta Addis (we’re married) “look my first white hair.” She replied “you have a very good wife and a very bad mirror.” Odd the same event, failure to […]

Robert Waldmann Barry Ritholtz argues that the problem with mortgages was underwriting standards and not securitization. He appeals to the very great authority of Monty Python. Click the link. Ritholtz seems not to be familiar with this new idea in economic theory called “Nash equilibrium”. Over -rated yes. Totally irrelevant not so much. One can […]

Robert Waldmann Matthew Yglesias discusses the financial crisis and the idea of causation. He shows that he was a philosophy major. I’m delighted. The question is whether the answer to the question “What caused the financial crisis?” is of the form “A, because if A had not been true, then there wouldn’t have been a […]

Robert Waldmann This is a brief follow up on my post on measuring bubbles. The amount lost due to sub-prime mortgages in default is tiny compared to the damage done. How large can the ratio of damage to losses be ? My answer is it can be infinite — that it is possible for irrational […]

Brad DeLong and John Cochrane agree on something. I must dissent. Delong and Cochrane agree that “The underlying decline in wealth from the housing bust was … around $400 billion. …” Indeed, relative to the size of the economy the losses during the crash of the dot-com bubble were four times as large. I object […]