February 2012
2 posts
“When George H. W. Bush in the 1970s and 1980s threatened to “unleash...”
– Brad DeLong: Hoisted from the Archives: Unleash Chiang Kai-Shek!!
George Saunders, "Tenth of December" →
January 2012
2 posts
“Imagine for a moment a world where all of the Repair shops and Automobile...”
– The Kangaroo Court of Wall Street | The Big Picture
“Back in 2005 I did an evil, evil thing. Discovering the proliferation of...”
– College Misery: Henchminion Sends In the Tale of “The Magna Carta Essay!”
December 2011
1 post
“…like a gambler admitting the fiction of a pack of cards, a corruptible...”
– Jorge Luis Borges, “The Art of Verbal Abuse”
November 2011
2 posts
“In the first part of the paper, D&S analyze the optimal tax rate on top...”
– http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/22/taxing-job-creators/
The incomplete logic of the American marketplace...
There’s an enabling logic in contemporary American capitalism that has put us where we are today. It goes like this: as a highly-skilled, well-educated member of society, there is in fact an ethical mandate to embrace cupidity and maximize profit to the exclusion of other goals. For, as you’ve been taught, when the most capable members of society are competing against one another in a...
October 2011
1 post
Most of economics can be done on the back of a napkin, but most things done on the back of a napkin are not economics.
(Alternately: fuck you, Arthur Laffer.)
September 2011
8 posts
“Then, in the middle of the recall madness, Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines...”
– California and Bust | Business | Vanity Fair
I voted for Bustamante.
“@Nouriel Nouriel Roubini: US/EZ/UK sinking in a recession.Issue is no longer...”
– Nouriel Roubini Calls the Double Dip
“Jan Pen, a Dutch economist who died last year, came up with a striking way to...”
– The rise and rise of the cognitive elite | The Economist
Notes Toward an Understanding of Obama's Economic... →
Brad DeLong excerpts (and analyzes) Ron Suskind on the economic policymaking regime of the Obama Administration.
“The problem starts somewhere around the mid-20s, when we get thrown out into the...”
– 80% of People Quietly Despise Their Lives | How To Split An Atom
“If people do make history, as this democratic view suggests, then two people...”
– Quantifying history: Two thousand years in one chart | The Economist
“Listening to the graduating students… Those majoring in peace and conflict...”
– Note to Self: Stray Thoughts on Some Undergraduate Majors Here at Berkeley that I Do Not Influence at All…
“Also, I remember that everything at that time was very fuzzy and abstract. I...”
– David Foster Wallace, The Pale King (§22)
August 2011
4 posts
“I’m not claiming this is because I’ve achieved some kind of zenlike...”
– Paul Graham, “Stuff” http://www.paulgraham.com/stuff.html
“Progressives tend to be enthusiastic about sticking it to every available Man...”
– Kevin Carey, Education Sector: http://www.educationsector.org/publications/rick-perry-higher-education-visionary-seriously-0
“Two-thirds of the world’s poorest people—those with less than $1.25 a day—live...”
– Official development assistance: Aid 2.0 | The Economist
WHAT IS TO BE DONE? (by us, overeducated,...
(Title reappropriated from the reappropriation by Lenin)
This is a post about careers, life, liberty, law, and lobsters, flushing out some ideas I’ve held in my mind-vice for far too long. The logic goes that the best way to rigorously define an idea is to force yourself to put it into concrete form. The second best way is to blog it. I’ve chosen a hybrid form.
I would honestly and...
November 2010
2 posts
Giving thanks in the eye of the shit storm
(My friend Brian asked me to post this, an e-mail I sent to friends today. I’ve tried to take this day each year and provide some context for why the thought-act of gratefulness is not only important, but why the nihilism and jadedness pervasive in our society needs to stop for a moment, at the very least once a year. -DG) —- My dear friends, Most of us were born in the 1980’s;...
“The crucial role of the financial system in a mostly free-enterprise economy is...”
– Benjamin Friedman (Harvard), FT 9/26/09
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/2de2b29a-9271-11de-b63b-00144feabdc0.html
Synopsis: Finance exists to allocate scarce investment savings toward productive ends. Can we empirically say that the benefits to productivity/growth from the current size/structure of the...
August 2010
1 post
Economics in its right place.
[Warning: This post is one, among many I’ve drafted in past years, attempting to delineate my views on the economics field and its proper aims. Reading this post may be damaging to your research ambitions and/or baseline serotonin levels.]
The economics discipline is marketed as teaching its pupils how to see the assumptions underlying a statement or argument – given some conclusion, the...
June 2010
1 post
“Before the invention of agriculture it is almost surely not good to be the king....”
– I Am in Shock… - Grasping Reality with Both Hands
January 2010
7 posts
The truth can't be messaged.
Ezra Klein on why the deficit freeze means we (wonks) lost the battle over the price of health insurance reform:
[Y]ou can’t look at this as anything less than a tremendous defeat for the Obama administration. It’s not the policy itself. The freeze locks in a post-stimulus, and potentially post-jobs-bill, level of spending. It’s not terribly onerous. But it’s also the...
California has ceased to make sense.
Acting Gov. Jerry Brown declared a state of emergency Thursday in five California counties, including San Francisco, where the week’s storms battered away the shoreline so badly officials had to close the Great Highway. The declaration clears the way for state assistance in hard-hit areas.
Okay, wait— what? Hold on a second: acting Governor Jerry Brown?
Brown is filling in for...
“Well, everybody can’t be average,” Taylor said. “This...”
– I f*&$ing love Mac Taylor, Legislative Analyst Extraordinaire.
Don’t count on windfall from U.S., California legislative analyst says - Sacramento Politics - California Politics | Sacramento Bee
Questions worth investigating: budget scoring and...
Paul Krugman has me thinking about the efficiency and equity of the proposed excise tax on insurance. But his call to vary the “Cadillac plan” tax-deductible ceiling by region and age got me pondering a more abstract question: are complex tax structures (even when more efficient and equitable) more politically challenging in the Upton Sinclairesque* factory floor we call the...
“[The] motives [of graduate applicants in the humanities] are usually some...”
– I find this article rather compelling:
Graduate School in the Humanities: Just Don’t Go - Advice - The Chronicle of Higher Education
“Barack Obama ran as a post-partisan African-American technocrat. His campaign...”
– Ten Things on Which Matt Taibbi Really Does Not Know What He Is Talking About - Grasping Reality with Opposable Thumbs
December 2009
3 posts
Brief thoughts: "the recent graduate"
The problem of the recent graduate is as follows: People pay for the perception of value. In the world of mission statements, workplans, and tasklists, this means discrete use cases, requiring discrete skills. In the world of high academia (Berkeley), they don’t teach you skills. It ain’t trade school. But your graduate status serves as a proxy for the ability to do — or rather,...
“What Politico — and other campaign-obsessed outlets — fear are the...”
– Ezra Klein - Seven stories Politico fears
The big takeaway for me has been something I’ve been grasping at: what parts of the political science literature are used by practitioners?
It seems to me like in most other fields it’s relatively straight forward (e.g., econ relevant to...
CycleTracks for iPhone - San Francisco County... →
And I thought all that talk in City & Regional Planning about “process blah blah blah” was crap. Well, wow, this is the kind of thing that makes the SF rent premium worth it:
“CycleTracks uses your iPhone’s GPS support to record your bicycle trips, display maps of your rides, and help transportation planners make San Francisco a better place to bike. At the end of...
November 2009
6 posts
Brief thoughts: Computer science versus...
One key reason I adore coding in computer science, and seem to come close to loathing it in statistics/econometrics, is that the sense of accomplishment is radically different:
In CS, you build something, and each step you have another function completed (another side of the house, another piece in the puzzle, another routine you never need to repeat again) that just works.
In statistical...
“Although the protesters emphasized the impact the new fees would have on the...”
– Source: SFGate, Rage at UC fee hike in L.A., Berkeley protests
This is an important point. These fee increases do not affect the neediest students, who pay no fees to begin with.
Worth noting here is that median family income in California is just about $70,000 for most families, so this covers a...
“Recommend Reexamination of Higher Education Needs and Priorities
*...”
– The Master Plan at 50: Assessing California’s Vision for Higher Education (California Legislative Analyst’s Office)
“1. Students are “striking” because they don’t want their fees...”
– Nuts & Boalts: Strike! (Or, Three Strikes? You’re Out)
You can call me an asshole, but I’m with this guy over the protestors.
Further posts on fixing California — and how students can contribute — to follow.
September 2009
4 posts
“[W]e need to move away from the Orwell “1984” paradigm. It was a...”
– Democracy in America: our blog on US politics | The Economist
“Now, call me naive—not all at once, please, settle down—but I hoped or imagined...”
– The Economist’s blogs remain the go-to fountain of up-to-the-minute dry, droll snark. I love it.
Democracy in America: our blog on US politics | The Economist
“Looks like we could (a) let the Chinese sell us tires, (b) tax each tire by...”
– Grasping Reality with Both Hands
“All of the actors in health care—from doctors to insurers to pharmaceutical...”
– http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200909/health-care
August 2009
1 post
What if Benjamin Franklin ran the Congressional... →
Best. Blog post title. Ever.
(With interesting commentary on the caveat of CBO’s mission, and the intrinisic organizational limits to its analysis.)
July 2009
1 post
It all remains, indeed, a farce.
ALL A FARCE ® is back.
After being lost among the horrors and travesties of hyper-private sector employment (read: consulting; perhaps meta- is the more accurate prefix), the web-based log of sorts is to be revived, by self-righteous mandate of its now-unemployed author.
Toward such an end, a reintroduction of sorts is merited, and so I steal it from my first attempt at the project using this...
June 2009
1 post
“For quite a while the answer is “no”; the Lower East Side is a real estate...”
– Lush Life - Richard Price - Book Review - New York Times
April 2009
0 posts
“The most fundamental problem is that as long as you have big banks, they can...”
– Frog, Toad, Cookies, and Financial Regulation « The Baseline Scenario
March 2009
3 posts
A technocrat does not a (Press) Secretary make...
From Bloomberg:
Geithner was asked at a Council on Foreign Relations event in New York about People’s Bank of China Governor Zhou Xiaochuan’s call for a new international reserve currency. He said while he had not read Zhou’s proposal, he understood it as a plan “designed to increase the use of the IMF’s special drawing rights. And we’re actually quite open to that.”
The dollar slid as much as...