Following the publication of this piece in the NY Times, I’ve had a string of email exchanges with Hal Varian, cc:ing Brad DeLong in the role of interested onlooker. I was surprised by the NY Times article since it included both a correct statement of the way in which Stern treats discounting and income redistribution (roughly speaking a 1 per cent change in income has the same value whenever it is incurred and whoever receives it) with a lot of statements that were either misleading or downright wrong, implying that the near-zero rate of pure time preference in the Stern Review implied a near-zero discount rate for cash flows.

Since Varian is one of the brightest and most technically careful people in the economics profession, I was unsurprised by the correct statement, but very surprised to see errors I’d already refuted when put forward by Arnold Kling, Bjorn Lomborg, Megan McArdle and others. Email revealed that the main problems arose from editorial attempts to ‘simplify’ things for readers, but we still have a lot of disagreements about the justifiability or otherwise of inherent discounting.

In any case, all this has spurred me on to produce my long-promised review of Stern on discounting, at least in draft form. Read, enjoy and criticise.

I’m on “bloggingheads again”:http://bloggingheads.tv/video.php?id=171 with Dan Drezner. Dan and I had a long discussion about Krugman and whether or not academics should get engaged in broader political debates, dipping into Krugman’s recent “piece”:http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/12699486/paul_krugman_on_the_great_wealth_transfer/print on inequality as we went along. One of the things I mentioned was the bit in Krugman’s _Peddling Prosperity_ where he talks about the way in which people can cherry-pick economic statistics in order to prove what they want to prove. Krugman is talking about aggregate growth statistics, but nonetheless the point travels.

by choosing your years carefully and talking a good game, you can seem to prove whatever conclusion you like … We learn that a clever propagandist, right or left, can always find a way to present the data on economic growth that seems to support her case. And we therefore also learn to take any statistical analysis from a strongly political source with handfuls of salt. Someone once said about partisan analysis that they use economic data the way a drunkard uses a lamppost: for support rather than illumination (Peddling Prosperity pp.110-111).

Cue “Alan Reynolds”:http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2006/12/reynolds_rap_on.html in comments at Mark Thoma’s place, defending a rather dubious-sounding WSJ “editorial”:http://users1.wsj.com/lmda/do/checkLogin?mg=wsj-users1&url=http%3A%2F%2Fonline.wsj.com%2Farticle%2FSB116607104815649971-search.html attacking claims that income inequality has been growing since _1980._

there is no clear evidence of a sustained and significant increase in inequality since 1988 by any other measure. I very carefully did not say there was no such evidence about 1981-87.

Indeed.

Reynolds goes on to defend his choice of periodization, but it would appear that he has a bit of a “track record”:http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2006/12/intellectual_ga.html#comment-26687832 (to extend Krugman’s metaphor) for employing lampposts not only to provide support, but to meet those other needs and imperatives that drunks are subject to while weaving their way home after a convivial evening.

(Note by the way that Krugman’s criticisms come in the midst of a longer discussion of how chancers at think tanks rather than proper economists have come to dominate debate; while academic peer review doesn’t serve as a perfect protection against this sort of cherry picking, it does make it considerably more difficult to get away with).

Reading an “article about the current snow shortage in Europe’s ski resorts”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/6185345.stm , I came across the following passage:

bq. “Already banks are refusing to offer loans to resorts under 1,500 metres as they fear for their future snow cover.”

This surely presents a tremendous money-making opportunity for global warming “skeptics”. If the banks won’t lend these resorts money, then there’s a gap which the denialists could exploit and thereby make themselves rich. What could possibly go wrong?

My friend Dennis Gaffney, a freelance writer, has a story in today’s NY Times about the return of “Postcards from Buster.” (He tells me that he has another piece on the same subject forthcoming in The Nation.) The PBS children’s show, you may remember, lost its funding after the animated title character, who interacts with real children, visited a girl from Vermont to learn about maple syrup. The child casually mentioned that she has two mothers – the implication, not stated explicitly, was that they are gay – and Buster replied with the unforgettable line: “Wow – that’s a lot of moms.”

In one of her first official acts, just before being sworn in as Secretary of Education, Margaret Spellings wrote to the head of PBS threatening to cut its funding because “Many parents would not want their young children exposed to the life-styles portrayed in this episode.” The “exposure”, of course, was simply portraying the existence of gay parents. The real sin was clearly the casual manner of presentation – like it was no big deal. PBS refused to distribute the episode and didn’t renew the show. Here’s a 2005 Washington Post piece about the cancellation, and here’s a Boston Globe story quoting the mom involved.

But now Buster is back with a new (albeit small) commitment from PBS and a variety of non-traditional funding sources. This season he’s visiting a family living on an Army base, and he is returning to visit some kids that he met in Louisiana during the first season who survived Katrina. Even when dealing with these tough issues, I’m sure the episodes will be presented with the same fun and matter-of-fact attitude that makes the show so enjoyable.

My eldest (wow, I have an eldest now, not just an elder) is annoyed with me. She’s decided she doesn’t like “folk” music, so doesn’t want me to play Rubber Folk (UK), the brilliant album of covers of Rubber Soul. After two car rides of her quite wrongly berating the covers, we took a ride with several of her friends.

Eldest: “Dad, turn this off”
Friend: “Wait, it’s the Beatles, you don’t like the Beatles?”
Eldest: “Yes, but this isn’t the Beatles, its folk singers copying them”
(2 more songs pass)
Friend: “It’s really, really cool. I love it”
Other Friend: “Yeah, these guys are cool, man” (I’m not kidding, they really talk like this).
Eldest (outraged): “NO THEY’RE NOT.”

They are. There are a couple of less than perfect tracks; The Word, unlikely to be included in anyone’s top 40 Beatles songs, is worse on this album than on the original. But June Tabor’s haunting version of In My Life rivals the original, and Paul Brady’s reinterpretation of You Won’t See Me is, dare I say it, better. Other highlights are Show of Hands and Ralph McTell. The album hangs together well enough to make me long for Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Folk Club Band, and Magical Mystery Folk.

Richard Thompson’s tongue-in-cheek covers album, 1,000 Years of Popular Music (UK), is even better.

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The one thing I enjoy about this season is watching How the Grinch Stole Christmas. Some part of me always hopes things will turn out differently this time — that maybe the Grinch won’t go back to Whoville and return the stuff. (Of course I do know better; still, it’s my holiday wish.) Also, it is impossible not to admire the Grinch’s efficiency.

From the blog Intellectual Conservative, I learn that my green hero is being Semiticized. Who knew?
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I’ll be at the MLA this year – will I see you there? – delivering a paper that is basically a major rewrite of my inaugural Valve post about the crisis in humanities publishing. (Other bloggers you know are on the same panel.) Here’s a bit from the old post: [click to continue…]

On Wednesday evening, a Breaking News session on “RTBF”:http://www.rtbf.be, the French-speaking Belgian public television announced that the Flemish (Dutch-speaking) parliament of Belgium had unilaterally announced their independence. It wasn’t true, of course, otherwise I would have written about it Wednesday night (wondering whether my Belgian passport would still be worth anything, and whether the Flemish independence would lead to a solution for “my conflict with the Belgian State”:https://crookedtimber.org/2006/08/21/whats-in-a-name/ ). The newsbulletin, of which (very poor) versions can be seen on YouTube (“here”:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4hIotCD9R0, “here”:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FvHhSdgZKOw, and “here”:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=452Nmk5rUmY ), looked realistic enough to understand that many Belgians believed it. From what I gather from the Belgian media, it caused a wave of consternation, and even some panic, throughout Belgium.

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Wow. These images are amazing. Viewing these may benefit considerably from a high-speed connection and definitely from a large screen.

In case you can’t get to it, it may be that the site is being blocked by your school/workplace, because years ago it was an “adult site” and it got banned by a bunch of filters. That raises an interesting point about buying domain names. It’s worth looking into their past. In this case, a quick check on the Wayback Machine would’ve helped.

In any case, the images are wonderful, enjoy if you can get to them.

We’ve posted before here about the “horridness of Christmas Music”:https://crookedtimber.org/2003/12/06/most-annoying-christmas-record. Ian McDonald has the “antidote”:http://ianmcdonald.livejournal.com/52744.html.

captainlucy makes the blinding discovery that Christmas muzak can be made bearable by inserting the word ‘Sex’ for ‘Christmas’.

‘I wish it could be sex everyday…’ etc etc.

It can also be made deeply disturbing, vide the first line from ‘Do they know it’s Christmas…

I’ve been away without ordered leave from the blogosphere for the last couple of weeks – the joys of end-of-semester committee crunch and grading. But two things that I’ve wanted to link to:

“Greg Bloom”:http://www.mydd.com/story/2006/12/3/231739/424 has another series of posts on the ways in which the Fund for Public Interest Research has resisted unionization efforts. The way in which many purportedly lefty organizations refuse to let their workers bargain for decent conditions is pretty shameful.

Alexander Mueller, fresh from porting over Susanna Clarke has translated the China Mieville seminar “into German too”:http://molochronik.antville.org/stories/1528809/. Great stuff.

Finally, I’ve been meaning for a while to link to this “Nir Rosen piece”:http://www.bostonreview.net/BR31.6/rosen.html, which is the best and most detailed on the ground discussion that I’ve seen of Iraq’s descent into civil war. I see via “TPM Muckraker”:http://www.tpmmuckraker.com/archives/002155.php that Rosen is venturing into the blogosphere.

Last night I mentioned to my wife — a reference librarian at the Library of Congress whose areas of concentration include e-commerce and information technology — that the BBC website had just run a story headlined “Blogging ‘set to peak next year.”” Here it is.

Her response to this was a sound (one I cannot quite transcribe) conveying a subtle blend of disbelief, disgust, and world-weariness. It was not at all a matter of pro-blog parti pris; rather, it reflected a deeply informed disdain for the methods and presumptions usually involved in making such predictions. As usual, I payed close attention to her opinion in the matter. (Reference librarians have amazing powers.)
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Next time you want to link to a New York Times article on your blog or want to bookmark it for future reference, you no longer have to rely on a bookmarklet to generate a permanent link. On each article page, there is now a Share link that reveals links to some sites plus the possibility of obtaining a permanent link to the piece.

The automatic link options are to Digg, Facebook and Newswine. What curious choices. I would love to know what went into those decisions, possible deals or whatnot. Digg users seem mostly interested in tech news so while it may make sense to have a quick link to that service on science and technology pieces, it doesn’t make sense on other sections of the NYTimes site. The idea suggested on The Mu Life about different links depending on the part of the site makes sense. And where are quick links to Reddit, Netscape, Yahoo My Web and del.icio.us, just to name a few. Has the Facebook user demographic changed significantly in recent months away from college students? If not (and I haven’t heard of any such significant changes) then why assume that users of that system would be most likely to want to bookmark and share NYTimes articles?

In any case, the good news is that they had the sense to create a permalink option that you can use to add the page to the social bookmarking site of your choice, which would be del.icio.us in my case thanks to its automated post-to-blog feature.

In the spirit of supporting the long tail, I thought I’d link to a few nifty items you likely won’t find in stores, but that are just as worthy as many of the items that are backed by big marketing budgets.

I found the booklet “Why Mommy is a Democrat” one day by clicking on a sponsored link in GMail (the line just above the message area). I liked the idea of communicating a message of this sort to little kids so I ordered a copy. I like the way the author and illustrator approached the topic. The idea of self-publishing something of this sort is also interesting. I purposefully use the word booklet instead of book despite the information on the site. The “book” feels more like a booklet. That doesn’t detract from its value. I mention it in the interest of realistic expectations. Cost: $10 including shipping in North America (with some possible savings for bulk orders).

On a different note, I highly recommend the California Soups and Salads 2006-07 Academic Calendar by Susan Beach. It covers September, 2006-December, 2007. Each month comes with a very inviting photo of a wonderful soup or salad dish plus its recipe on the side. Susan is our resident chef here at the Center and is an amazing cook. This could be a great gift for a myriad of people. Cost: $10 including shipping.

Moving on, I found the jams and jellies maker McKenzie’s Own at a summer fair last year and thought their products were divine. I bought two spreads: Mom’s Horseradish Spread and the White Chocolate Raspberry Spread. Both were great. Cost: $6.50 each plus $6.00 shipping.

I only have experience with online ordering regarding the first product, the others I bought in person. Full disclosure: I have no financial interest in promoting these products, I bought them and liked them, that’s all there is to it. I do know Susan personally though.

The site Etsy hosts lots of independent sellers although some of the products there tend to be on the expensive side. Lulu lets people self-publish books, calendar, etc. Of course, one can also find independents on ebay and on various corners of the Web. But what are those corners? Do share your favorites, I’m always curious to find the hidden gems.

This is second in the Gift guide series. Next week: giving through donations.