I’ve done the tallying and the results are below the fold, in reverse order.
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It appears to be a commonplace gaining ground every day that the main reason we have a credit crisis (about which I am not writing; this is an essay in recent monetary history) is that bankers created it, and specifically that they created it because they are stupid. Nicholas Taleb (who doesn’t eat foods unless they have a name in Hebrew or Doric Greek, I just bring this up as an interesting fact rather than to suggest that here’s a man who knows stupid when he sees it) has been really quite cutting on the subject, among others. Stupid, stupid stupid. Isn’t it a shame that these stupid people in their stupidity brought this crisis among us? Don’t we need a blue-ribbon commission to make sure that such stupids never have the chance to do so much damage again?

Harrumph.
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How about some old Les Paul stuff? You can’t go wrong.

“Nola” [you haven’t heard it? You really should give a listen.]

“Tiger Rag”

“Live Version of Hummingbird” (part 1 of a three part live series)

The Wizard of Waukesha: A Film About Les Paul (5 part series)

Les Paul and the Teenagers

The Les Paul and Mary Ford TV Show (there are 10 or so of these). Mary Ford is always petting the plant or spreading avocado on bread or something suitably domestic while she sings.

If this sort of thing sounds good, I recommend the The Best of the Capitol Masters: 90th Birthday Edition [amazon]. I just bought it and, boy, am I happy.

Nate Silver wants to scrap the “squiggly” audience reaction dials during Presidential debates. My instinctive reaction to this is “step away from the bacon, son, leave the bacon out of this. I love the crawler and think that it really helps you understand what’s going on in the debates – in particular, it helps you take one step back from your own prejudices. It’s also just about the only input into debate commentary that comes more or less unmediated; the anonymous “undecided” focus group participants might be dumb or irrational, but they’re at least not pushing an agenda. Raw data is always good to have – although Nate’s sample size points are well made, I actually doubt how much potential there is for practical error to be introduced, given that one doesn’t actually look to the crawler for straightforward yes/no answers to questions, just for an overall impression of how the participants are going over.

My only complaint about the crawler is that CNN removes it from the screen when the debate finishes. I absolutely wish that they continued to show the favourable/unfavourable reactions of the dial-testing focus group to the talking heads on the news afterwards; you’d be able to see the worm plunging every time Wolf Blitzer opened his gob.. I suspect a few uncomfortable home truths would arise out of that one. In general, more new programs should use dial-testing crawlers. And not just news, thinking about it; why doesn’t Big Brother have a crawler, since it’s also basically a popularity contest? Or the Eurovision? Chat shows would be great entertainment if you could see boring or vain starlets bleeding their popularity away in real time. At this precise moment, I can’t think of a single program on TV that wouldn’t be improved by having a dial-test at the bottom of the screen.

As the various asset price bubbles of the past decades or so inflated, and in some cases burst, there was vigorous debate about what, if anything should be done about them. The two main camps were those who advocated doing nothing (most notably Alan Greenspan), on the grounds that monetary policy should be focused solely on inflation, and those who thought that the settings of monetary policy should take asset prices into account. The first group won the debate at the time, at least as far as actual policy was concerned, with consequences we can all see. Most proponents of Greenspanismhave now conceded defeat
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In a paper in the (institutionalist) Journal of Economic Issues, which came out in 2006, Stephen Bell and I took a different view of the debate. We argued that there was little scope to respond to asset bubbles by changing the settings of existing monetary policy instruments, and that “any serious attempt to stabilize financial market outcomes must involve at least a partial reversal of deregulation.” Among other things, we pointed out the fact that given a presumption in favour of financial innovation, asset prices bubbles were inevitable, and that ‘In the absence of a severe failure in the financial system of the United States, it seems unlikely that ideas of a ‘new global financial architecture’ will ever be much more than ideas.’

You can read the full paper
Bell, S. and Quiggin, J. (2006), ‘Asset price instability and policy responses: The legacy of liberalization’, Journal of Economic Issues, XL(3), 629-49.

here

Can anyone help me understand why some people are so vehemently opposed to certain people (or topics) having entries on Wikipedia? Why do people get so worked up about the mere existence of certain entries? Currently, an entry for Joe the Plumber is being debated. Does it really dilute the value of Wikipedia to have entries like that? I remember when some people contested my entry (I wasn’t the one to put it up), it felt like some amateurish tenure review, except with not quite the same consequences. Would anyone care to defend the practice? I’m eager to understand the motivations better.

The responses to my recent post about Breast Cancer Awareness Month were interesting. One commenter suggested that instead of addressing specific issues or charities, it would be better to “focus our energy on political action for good national health insurance“. I’ve seen this argument made before, specifically about breast cancer awareness. While you certainly won’t get any arguments from me against better health insurance (I hate hate hate hate the system in the US and I’m among the privileged who at least has health insurance), I’m not convinced that that’s the only issue at hand when it comes to achieving adequate levels of awareness and preventive care.

First, should we give up on incremental action in other realms until the overall health care system gets figured out? Second, even if we do achieve major gains on that front, will that really take care of all associated concerns? Unlikely. One way to approach this is to see whether people in countries that have good universal health care are all educated about various illnesses and preventive measures. The answer is likely no, which suggests that there is room for awareness campaigns. [click to continue…]

My friend Eric Schwitzgebel (philosophy prof. at UC Irvine, but once upon a time we played quite a bit of poker, once a week) craves responses to an online survey he devised with Fiery Cushman (a psychologist at Harvard). It’s ‘the moral sense test‘. I gather it is intended to investigate whether respondents with academic philosophical training respond differently to a suite of moral dilemmas (you know, the usual sort of potted philosophy cases) than do others (you know, the man on the street, mere mortals, Joe the Plumber).

I realize that trollycar-style ethical theory is regarded by many with a certain degree of skepticism – nay, it is the tipmost taper on the candelabrum of ‘not very punk rock’. Please feel free to use the comment box to express such sentiments, as your intellectual conscience and spleen dictate. But it strikes me as rather a good idea to investigate the sociology of philosophy, as it were, by checking to see to what degree academic philosophers’ ‘intuitions’ are, indeed, shared by non-philosophers. So I’m John Holbo and I approve this experiment.

UPDATE: Since we are discussing the survey in comments, you might want to take it before reading comments, if you are going to take it at all.

Many thanks to the CT readers who’ve come up with examples of wingnuts’ heads exploding as a result of Paul Krugman’s Nobel prize. Now it’s decision time. I’ve narrowed the field down to the five most impressive spontaneous human combustions that commenters here, at Kathy G.’s and at Brad DeLong’s have reported. And you get to choose the winner by voting in the comments section below. The wingnut with the most votes after a voting period to be determined by meself will be allowed to display both this “still”:http://www.flickr.com/photos/shocho/221986094/ from David Cronenberg’s _Scanners_, and an electronic certificate attesting that he/she has won the ‘Oh Noes! My Head Asploded” award for 2008, on his/her website. He/she will also of course have all associated bragging rights. The contestants, in no particular order, below the fold …
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First, may I say the triptans are a marvelous class of drug? When you’re wading through a 5 day migraine and liquids, not to mention solid food, are a distant memory. When the right side of your brain wakes you up every hour or two to pound a little harder on the left. When you haven’t been able to complete a sentence for days, but that’s just fine as you can’t leave your house to find any humans to talk to and you wouldn’t be able to find your way back home anyway. When you know, you just know that there’s one last zomig in the house if only you could find it. And then you do.

Joan Didion wrote that she came to regard her enemy, migraine, as a friend. Susan Sontag pointed out that describing illness with military metaphors has certain failings, not the least of which is to make ill people feel defeated. I don’t hold with making an ally of migraine, but I will grant you that the first day after the enemy decamps is a Red Letter Day. Today I am so full of vim and vigour that it seems a shame to waste all that energy on work. (Sadly I have so much to catch up on, I’ll have to.) The world is a bright, clear and shiny place today, even if my 401(k) is worth 53% less than what I’ve spent on it. So be it. Feeling like this, I could work until I’m 106, rather like that cheery nun who hasn’t cast a vote since Eisenhower, and who’s thrown her veil in the ring for Obama.

To business; why are triptans so expensive? Fair enough that nobody knows whether migraines are caused by bad chemistry or bad wiring. (Presumably it all looks the same at the molecular level.) So we’re not quite sure why triptans work so well for some people. But when they work, they are transformative within minutes. In Belgium, a month’s supply used to cost me about $100. Here in the US, my gold-plated insurer gives them to me more or less free. But someone’s making a lot of money either way, and migraine has such a huge impact on productivity/absenteeism that getting the cure for cheap would help hundreds of thousands of people and their employers. When did we invent this miracle drug, and will we be sharing the bounty any time soon?

Expanding my unsystematic researches into early 20th Century German typography and book design, I recently stumbled across this gem (click for larger):

It’s the George Salter designed cover for a 1930 German edition of Dos Passos’ The 42nd Parallel.

It’s a perfect example of ‘vague sense of a foreign land‘ phenomenon. He’s got a cowboy in Georgia. A line of Dusenbergs to represent Tennessee, just north of the skyscrapers of New Orleans. A boxer guarding the Mexican border. And we’ve all heard those dreadful stories about trains through Utah menaced by baseball players employing the classic overhead swing. And I dunno what army is invading Chicago. Other examples of this sort of thing?

As Kieran notes in comments below, the comments thread to Tyler Cowen’s (perfectly reasonable) “Krugman post”:http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2008/10/paul-krugman-wi.html is pretty hilarious. But given Krugman’s place of pride in the wingnut demonology, I’m sure that this is only a mere scraping of what’s out there on the Internets today. It furthermore occurs to me that someone (i.e. Me) should do a comments thread to collate and conserve the _very bestest_ blogposts and comments on the Vast Nobel Prize Conspiracy. My “opening bid”:http://volokh.com/posts/1223906449.shtml#459727, from ‘derut’ at The Volokh Conspiracy.

Excellent. He was a pseudo Nobel prize. That he deserves. As his politics is pseudoscientific. Great. Now I can applaude. I am sure many of you have watched him on cable networks. Has anyone else noticed he seems a little off. He speaks like a mouse and his beady eyes have a strange stare. He looks like if someone droped a glass he would scream.

It’s the spellings of ‘applaude’ and ‘droped’ that give it that special something. Anyone able to top that?

Update: “Kathy G.”:http://thegspot.typepad.com/blog/2008/10/warmest-congrat.html had this idea before I did.

And indeed it was – Paul Krugman has won the Nobel Prize for Economics[1].

The citation says he got it “for his analysis of trade patterns and location of economic activity” – ie for new trade theory. Which certainly did pretty much light a bomb under the subject when he published it in the 1980s, but if this is all it’s for, it’s frankly surprising that Krugman got it all to himself; there were plenty of other people who might have felt they deserved a share.

I can’t help thinking that this is actually Krugman’s reward for being the public voice of mainstream sensible Keynesianism for the last fifteen years, starting with the use of the liquidity trap to explain the Japanese slump, going through his prediction of the Asian crises and onward to today. In which case, well done the Nobel[see note 1 again] committee – Krugman’s NYT column has been more use to the public standing of economists than more or less anything published in the journals.

And, of course, congratulations to Prof. Krugman himself, who might very well have believed that he’d done his professional status irreparable harm by taking such an aggressive line against the government of the day; he now gets the double pleasure of receiving the highest reward in economics, just as all of his detractors see their repuations ruined. There is probably some pithy epithet from Keynes or JK Galbraith to be inserted here on the general subject of honesty being the best politics, but I can’t think of it just at this instant.

Update: Hey, have you seen the new Guinness advert?

[1] blah blah blah Sveriges Riksbank. Nobody cares, you know.

Paul Krugman has been awarded the 2008 Nobel prize for economics[1]. The rules of the prize, honoured more in the breach than in the observance in economics, say that it is supposed to be given for a specific discovery, and Krugman is cited for his groundbreaking work in the economics of location done from the late 1970s to the early 1990s.

The reality, though, is that economics prizes are awarded for careers. Krugman’s early work put him on the list of likely Nobelists, but his career took an unusual turn around the time of the 2000 election campaign. While he has still been active in academic research, Krugman’s career for the last eight years or more has been dominated by his struggle (initially a very lonely one) against the lies of the Bush Administration, its supporters and enablers. Undoubtedly, the award of the prize in this of all years, reflects an appreciation of this work on behalf of truth in economics and politics more generally.[2]

We at CT have a more parochial reason for cheering this outcome. Paul has generously agreed to take a part in a CT seminar on the work of Charles Stross, which should be published in the next month or so. Without giving too much away, there are some Nobel-related insights in his contribution.

fn1. Strictly speaking, the Bank of Sweden prize in Economic Sciences in honour of Alfred Nobel, or something like that.
fn2. Doubtless, Republicans will complain about being implicitly identified, yet again, as enemies of science and of truth. But they’ve made their bed and must lie in it (in both senses of the word).