The Economist magazine has started a five part series on the Global Financial Crisis, and the lessons from it. Should be a lot of fun. Part one is here. They conclude: The regulatory reforms that have since been pushed through at Basel read as an extended mea culpa by central bankers for getting things so grievously wrong […]
As I indicated here I am reading Probability, Econometrics, and Truth. A nice outline of things, I’m enjoying it at present (I was 20% of the way through when I wrote this post over five weeks ago). Two quotes I’d like to note down here:
I am currently reading “Inequality Reexamined” by Amartya Sen, as I’ve never read his books – only his papers. This suits my current binge reading of inequality, income distribution, and methodology of economics and econometrics books I’m trying to read (albeit too slowly for my own liking). Anyway, the prologue immediately neatly summarises a point […]
Good paper by the Prime Minister’s Chief Science advisor on policy – focused strongly on transparent evidence based policy. I can’t disagree with this as a framework! 1) identifying problems; 2) measuring their magnitude and seriousness; 3) reviewing policy options; 4) systematically assessing likely consequences of options; and 5) evaluating results of policy interventions. When […]
Extremely sad news that Ronald Coase passed on today. His work on economics had a profound impact upon the discipline, and significantly added to the way economists think about the allocation of scarce resources – so economics itself. There are few people who have had this sort of impact. While I was going to write […]
I’m not quite sure how to take these comments by Gareth Morgan – once they’ve written up some more details of their experience they will likely point out that they are talking about the individuals and communities in North Korea. In this way they will be talking about the amazing way these people are trying […]