Even more than Digby on CalPERS, the one piece everyone should read today is Charlie Stross on International Travel. Since this is an economics blog, let’s pull a key section: Here’s the rub: security is a state of mind, not a procedure. Procedures can’t cope with attackers, because they’re inflexible. If you search passengers for […]

Simon Johnson on the possible consequences of Goldman Going Greek. Economics of Contempt explains why economist John Cochrane should not be allowed to talk about finance. (Bonus coverage: EofC’s previous piece on John Taylor) Alea’s jck on how all the talk about risk management became mainstreamed.

While several good people—including several of my wife’s relatives and one of our bloggers—graduated from Pravda-on-the-Chuck, I am saddened to note that their faculty’s efforts in creating the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) has been muted. Such, at least, can be fairly concluded by the nominees and final ballot for The Dynamite Prize in Economics, being […]

Down here it’s just winners and losersAnd don’t get caught on the wrong side of that line This will be a long post. Even with all the pictures above the fold. It started with a finger exercise during my daughter’s swim team practice: Just in case you thought I was picking on The Big C […]

UPDATE: Greg Sargent (via Glenn Greenwald’s Twitter feed) notes that I am hardly alone in my concluding pargraph. The last even semi-useful part of health care “reform” (and that was of dubious value) is dead: The idea of letting people ages 55 to 64 buy into Medicare, announced just last week, had threatened to explode […]

First, David Leonhardt argued that this recession was good for workers. Now, Floyd Norris apparently has decided to mix and match data. (I wonder if the fact many NYT employees who are looking at their 45-day severance offers is having an effect on its economic coverage.) One of the standard “economist jokes” is about the […]

I try to like the NYTimes Economics Reporting. I really do. Heck, any place that publishes Uwe Reinhardt can’t be all bad. But David Leonhardt, as he does often enough that I hesitate to read his work, again goes beyond the pale today, and clearly does so deliberately. The offending paragraph: Twenty-two months after the […]

It has long been a standard claim of economics—iirc, Robert Lucas was the first to say it aloud, though it may have been Gary Becker*—that a man who marries his housekeeper lowers GDP. Apparently, Dubner and Levitt have taken this claim—along with their Rick James title**—to heart. Echidne has the details. A short sample: There […]

Brad DeLong does in less than a weekend. He is as enchanted as Robert was*: My personal favorite is a giant parasol 18,000 miles in diameter at L1 to absorb and then reradiate a chunk of sunlight in other bands. but notes the reality as well: But I have never been able to find anyone […]

Ken Houghton is talkin’ about his generation. Pete Davis, Mark Thoma (who at least has the decency to phrase it in the form of a question), N. Gregory Mankiw, and Brad DeLong explain why there should not be any penalties against providers of West Virginia water (h/t Bitch). Because fungible is fungible, even if it […]