GDP and Its Shortfalls

Nate Silver (of election projection fame) has an excellent post demonstrating the shortsightedness of harping on GDP numbers, in this case with regards to climate change. He takes to task Jim Manzi, whose argument is that even pessimistic assumptions point to a 5% reduction in GDP from global warming down the road. Silver endeavors to [...]

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A Heterodox Ranking of Econ PhD Programs

It’s been too long since I’ve been meaning to post this…
A devoted reader of this blog emailed me two articles recently; the first (pdf), by Therese Grijalva and Clifford Nowell, was published last year in the Southern Economic Journal. It endeavors to rank PhD programs in economics overall and by field. They essentially assign a [...]

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What’s NOT Happening with GM

From Richard Wolff
The greatest tragedies among many in the collapse and bankruptcy of General Motors concern what is not happening.  There are those solutions to GM’s problems not being considered by Obama’s administration.  There are the solutions not being demanded by the United Auto Workers Union (UAW).  There are all the solutions not even being [...]

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Save Our CEOs

“Now, I know what you’re thinking, ‘I already gave at the bailout,’ and I know you did. But even if you’ve given in the past, give some more. It’ll make you feel good.”

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“The New Socialism”

From Wired:
Bill Gates once derided open source advocates with the worst epithet a capitalist can muster. These folks, he said, were a “new modern-day sort of communists,” a malevolent force bent on destroying the monopolistic incentive that helps support the American dream. Gates was wrong: Open source zealots are more likely to be libertarians than [...]

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Poor Still Poor

Op-Ed from Barbara Ehrenreich:
The human side of the recession, in the new media genre that’s been called “recession porn,” is the story of an incremental descent from excess to frugality, from ease to austerity. The super-rich give up their personal jets; the upper middle class cut back on private Pilates classes; the merely middle class [...]

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Mark Thoma on Blogging

Via himself, Mark Thoma has an interview with the Kaufmann Foundation about blogging. Thoma’s blog is the first one I read religiously, and he is still my go-to-guy for links, etc. I think his thoughts on blogging are pretty interesting, so this video is worth a watch.
Edit: having trouble embedding, watch it over at the [...]

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Co-Housing

From the NYTimes:
“What is co-housing?”The Cohousing Association of the United States has been answering that question quite frequently as more people sign up for its tours: The communities consist of individual houses whose residents share some common space, a few communal dinners a week and a commitment to green living.
The movement has been gaining momentum [...]

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Michael Sandel: Markets and Morals

From the 2009 Reith Lectures:
We live in a time of financial crisis and economic hardship – everybody knows that – but we also live in a time of great hope for moral and civic renewal…Whatever reforms may emerge, one thing is clear: the better kind of politics we need is a politics oriented less to [...]

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“A triumph of good judgment”

Robert Skidlesky has an opinion piece in the Financial Times (h/t Mark Thoma) in which he injects the insight of Keynes and the notion of intellectual battles into current debates. Skidelsky is an important scholar of Keynes, and wrote an award-winning three-volume biography about his life and work.
Skidlesky begins by distinguishing economics from the natural [...]

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