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http://stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/stumbling_and_mumbling/ - An extremist, not a fanatic
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What is the link between personal identity and behaviour? Two recent episodes pose this question. One is the death of Bill Barker , the PC who died during Cumbria’s floods. Was his death the act of a heroic character, or was he - as Matthew Parris asks - merely an ordinarily decent man who just ...
Government
Here are three new papers on happiness research. First, German research finds that there’s a strong day of the week effect upon happiness. People are much less happy on Sundays than other days; they side with Billie Holiday rather than Fats Domino . You might think this is because people dread ...
Other
In a letter to the FT, Martin Weale writes: Fiscal policy should be run on the principle of saving up for the next crisis and our government should have saved the revenues associated with the financial boom and a buoyant housing market. Is this true? I ask for two reasons. One is simply that ...
Stocks
Via the NBER come two new papers on the effect on immigration. First, Giovanni Peri shows (pdf) , from looking across US states, that migrants are good for the economy: We present three main findings, two of which are quite new in this literature. First, we confirm that immigrants do not ...
Government
Is the government spending too little? I know it sounds a silly question, but it’s the one raised by today’s public finance numbers . My table shows what I mean. I’ve taken it from page 3 of today’s press release (pdf) and table 2.8 of the Budget 2009 supplementary material (pdf). This shows ...
Other
Joel Waldfogel’s Scroogenomics provides the academic justification for the campaign to cancel Christmas. The gist of his argument will be familiar to anyone who knows his now-notorious paper, The Deadweight Loss of Christmas (pdf) . Quite simply, we are worse at buying for other people than we ...
Other
I said yesterday that MPs should know their Bayes’ theorem . To see its usefulness, let’s apply it to the question: do the deaths of British troops show that the mission in Afghanistan is failing? Bayes’ theorem lets us answer this if we know just two numbers (well, actually four, but two are ...
Other
The FT asks : what should MPs know? Its list of questions contains a glaring omission. I would ask: describe Bayes theorem , and discuss some common deviations from it. The reason for asking this is simple. It is a cliché that MPs, and especially ministers, must exercise good ...
Other
The Tory Party is less popular than heroin. That - if anything - is the lesson from the Glasgow North East by-election result. The Tories got 1075 votes. The best estimate (table 3 of this pdf ) is that there are over 13,000 “problem drug users” in the city of Glasgow - defined as users ...
Stocks
Noble Corporation
Wage inequality is falling. This is one message from yesterday’s Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings. My table shows some measures of this. It shows the ratio of the 90th percentile of gross hourly wages for full-time workers to the 10th percentile. (That is, the wages of someone earning more ...
Other
Duncan has endorsed Keynes’ old proposal to maintain cheap and easy money, and so achieve “an increase in the volume of capital until it ceases to be scarce”. I’m not sure this will work. We’ve tried something like it twice, and on both occasions it proved unsustainable. In the 1960s, low real ...
Other
Employment Downturn
Our economy is becoming increasingly feminized. That’s one message of today’s labour market figures . These show that, over the last 12 months, male employment has fallen by a net 447,000 whilst female employment has dropped just 43,000 net. Thanks to this, there are now almost as many female ...
Other
How much influence does the media really have on our behaviour? This question is bedevilled by the problem of interpreting causality: do people vote Tory because the read the Daily Mail, or do they read the Daily Mail because they vote Tory? This new paper (pdf) by Baris Yoruk sheds light upon ...
Stocks
Having children makes you miserable. That’s the message of this paper by Luca Stanca, which draws upon data from 94 countries: Having children is negatively related to subjective well-being. Conditioning on individual characteristics shows that the effect of parenthood on well-being is positive ...
Other
stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com - 18 days ago
—
stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com —
Gordon Brown’s proposal for some sort of transactions
tax seems to have been rejected by Tim Geithner,...
which means the idea is, in effect, dead: such a tax is only remotely feasible if applied globally. This is good. There are (at least) three ...
(more)
Against a transactions tax
Comments
vote down
Lawrance G. Lux
found this 18 days agofound this
The house next to mine is up for rent. But I have no say over who the tenant should be. Is this right? I’m prompted to ask by Martin Wolf’s argument for immigration controls. He points out that immigrants add to congestion. But if next door is rented out to a three-car family, I’ll suffer from ...
Other
Is it just me, or do several X Factor contestants look like Arsenal players: Danyl and Eduardo; Joe and Cesc, Jedward and Nicklas Bendtner’s bollocks? Which is a preface to saying that Jedward raise an important point about social choice theory - namely, that the public‘s “choice” can depend ...
Government
Social Democrats
It’s insufficiently appreciated that Alan Johnson’s sacking of David Nutt has direct bearing on the question of MPs’ pay. What I mean is that there are two views of what an MP should do. On the one hand, there‘s the Burkean view , that MPs should exercise independent judgement: Your ...
Other
Simon Johnson
Are the Tories planning on a huge fall in the pound? This is one question raise by Giles Wilkes ’ paper, Slash and Grow , in which he argues that it’s unlikely that capital spending and/or net exports will grow sufficiently to keep GDP growing well in the face of government spending cuts. Giles ...
Government
Alistair Darling says he wants a “safer, more competitive banking system.” But isn’t there a trade-off between these two goals? I mean, competition generates instability, because firms that lose crash out of business. Schumpeter’s “perennial gale of creative destruction ” will blow some ...
