Quote of the Day - Chris Hayes

"My disposition as a human being is kind of a go-along-to-get-along person. I tend to trust authority. I tend to think people in charge broadly know what they're doing, don't lie to you, aren't going to start wars for no reason, and, you know, watching Iraq happen and then watching the financial crisis happen and then Katrina in the middle of that, you know, you turn around and you think, 'Wait a second: No one is on top of anything. Who the heck is in charge here? These people who say that they know what they're doing don't know what they're doing. I'm not going to trust them the next time they tell me they know what they're doing.' It's a radically unmooring feeling to recognize that people that you just figured kind of had it under control don't have it under control and might be totally incompetent or completely corrupt or totally self-dealing."-Chris Hayes

from

Links of the Week - 12 April 2013

Haircuts on Intrade - Rajiv Sethi (via Mark Thoma)


The nihilism of David Stockman - Neil Irwin

Michael Lewis on the King of Human Error

Will Bitcoins Make Me Rich? - Farhad Manjoo

Two versions of Goodhart's Law - Noah Smith

Fool's Gold - Eric Posner

Inside the Bitcoin economy - Free Exchange

Quote of the Day - Matt Yglesias

"The concept of "redistribution" falsely implies that the existence of property is prior to the existence of the state."

-Matthew Yglesias


more

Conscience Warrior Store

We are pleased to announce this week the launch of the Conscience Warrior Store. The Store is powered by Amazon, and will include books, films, and other products that may be of interest to readers of Conscience Warrior. 

All transactions made in the Store will be handled by Amazon. In the interest of full disclosure, CW will receive a small fee for each transaction. That said, all products listed in the Store are actually endorsed by CW, with the exception of those listed in the 'Similar Items' sidebar, which are generated by Amazon's magic algorithms.

If you have any comments or suggestions regarding the Store, please email here.

Conscience Warrior Store

Links of the Week - 5 April 2013

Is "Intellectual Property" a Misnomer?
Tim Taylor

The choice between debts and austerity
Larry Summers, via Jonathan B. Wight

The problem with Twitter
Ezra Klein

The Rewards of Being Very Serious
Paul Krugman

The Price Is Wrong
Paul Krugman

Jack-booted Insurance-bringing Thugs
Paul Krugman

Soup Kitchens Caused the Great Depression
Jonathan Wight

Stockman, Morality Plays, and Wishful Thinking

An excellent video here on the David Stockman kerfuffle. The most important takeaway for me was the idea, previously articulated elsewhere, that macroeconomics is not a morality play. That is to say, if the answer to a macro problem is normatively pleasing, that fact is a coincidence.

Many of us have normative views about 'what ought to be.' These views may differ from person to person; that's ok. Views on 'how the world works' are of a different genus. These things are testable. Disagreements of this nature are resolvable through empiricism, if the data exist.

A related idea: if your theory of how the world works is untestable, it's not really a theory; it's probably just a wish.



**UPDATE: Neil Irwin disassembles Stockman's argument, looks around inside, and doesn't find much.

Quote of the Day - Martin Luther King, Jr: I've Been to the Mountaintop

3 April 1968
I’ve Been to the Mountaintop
Memphis, TN

audio

Thank you very kindly, my friends. As I listened to Ralph Abernathy and his eloquent and generous introduction and then thought about myself, I wondered who he was talking about. [Laughter] It's always good to have your closest friend and associate to say something good about you, and Ralph Abernathy is the best friend that I have in the world.

I'm delighted to see each of you here tonight in spite of a storm warning. You reveal that you are determined [Audience:] (Right) to go on anyhow. (Yeah, All right) Something is happening in Memphis, something is happening in our world. And you know, if I were standing at the beginning of time with the possibility of taking a kind of general and panoramic view of the whole of human history up to now, and the Almighty said to me, "Martin Luther King, which age would you like to live in?" I would take my mental flight by Egypt (Yeah), and I would watch God's children in their magnificent trek from the dark dungeons of Egypt through, or rather, across the Red Sea, through the wilderness, on toward the Promised Land. And in spite of its magnificence, I wouldn't stop there. (All right)

Quote of the Day - Martin Luther King, Jr: Beyond Vietnam

4 April 1967
Beyond Vietnam
New York, NY

audio

Mr. Chairman, ladies and gentlemen, I need not pause to say how very delighted I am to be here tonight, and how very delighted I am to see you expressing your concern about the issues that will be discussed tonight by turning out in such large numbers. I also want to say that I consider it a great honor to share this program with Dr. Bennett, Dr. Commager, and Rabbi Heschel, some of the most distinguished leaders and personalities of our nation. And of course it’s always good to come back to Riverside Church. Over the last eight years, I have had the privilege of preaching here almost every year in that period, and it’s always a rich and rewarding experience to come to this great church and this great pulpit.

Links of the Week - 29 March 2013

The Economics of Evil Google: Paul Krugman


Attacking Success: Paul Krugman


Markets in almost nothing: Noah Smith


Three Cheers for the Nanny State: Sarah Conly


The Unnatural Rate Hypothesis: Paul Krugman


Crying Wolf, Bear, Lion -- Whatever It Takes: Mark Thoma

Quote of the Day - Winston Churchill on the Moochers

"Here let me remark that the best way to insure against unemployment is to have no unemployment.

"There is another point: unemployables, rich or poor, will have to be toned up. We cannot afford to have idle people. Idlers at the top make idlers at the bottom. No one must stand aside in his working prime to pursue a life of selfish pleasure.

"There are wasters in all classes. Happily they are only a small minority in every class, but anyhow we cannot have a band of drones in our midst, whether they come from the ancient aristocracy or the modern plutocracy, or the ordinary type of pub crawler."

-Winston Churchill


from

via

Strong-Dollar Debate

Frederic Mishkin, John Taylor, Steve Forbes, and James Grant debate the motion "America doesn't need a strong-dollar policy."

The Federal Reserve has two basic methods by which to conduct monetary policy. One is to hold the growth level of the money supply (relatively) fixed, and allow interest rates to adjust to macro conditions. The other is to target a range of inflation and interest rates, and allow the money supply to fluctuate with macro conditions.

I describe this contrast because it is analogous to a very good point that came out of the above debate. If we fix the value of money to some sort of benchmark*, the macroeconomy will then be allowed its full natural range of fluctuations and gyrations, for better or for worse. Better, perhaps, to target various macro indicators**, and make (less harmful) monetary adjustments to maintain target ranges. This is, of course, both what the Fed has done since the mid 1980s and what conservative economist John Taylor has prescribed for twenty years.


*Gold, wheat, oil, gummy bears, and so forth.

**Such as changes in CPI and PPI, various short and long interest rates, change in GDP, unemployment levels, etc.

Links for the week - 22 March 2013

Increasing the Minimum Wage does not lower Employment, Continued

Singapore’s Lessons for an Unequal America

Is capitalism moral?

What Ben Bernanke would say...

"If it were any less diverse it would look like the Senate."

Google and the Lucas Critique

The Economics of Evil Google