Burn it with Fire: Friday classes edition

Here's a graph of attendance over the semester from a large Harvard class:

Students don't come to Friday classes. This is freakin' Harvard. It's much worse at State U.

Plus, 50 minute MWF classes are a hard way to get a lot of material covered. Between the settle down and the throat clearing and the review and the get-away, you got like 35 minutes to do real business.

There's just no need for them. Schools should go MW and T/Th and be done with it. Friday's are for seminars, grading, meeting with your advisees, and having lunch with some colleagues.

How to stuff a screwed electorate

Yes people, I know things are tough around here. 17% of the government is shut down. The apocalypse awaits in a week.

But consider Azerbaijan, where they release election results before the voting takes place!

Alfred E. Neuman,  err, Inspector Clouseau,  err, this guy pictured here, has been "president" of Azerbaijan for 10 years, since his daddy appointed him to take his place.

Luckily for him, he pre-won reelection to another term. I bet he and his family were on pins and needles waiting to see how the pre-announcement would go.

Seeking investors for my new business venture

If Ikea thinks they can sell solar panels in England, I can damn well sell ski equipment in Oklahoma! Check out the cool logo that RKG dug up for me:

Heavy Handed metaphor alert

Bad to the bone

Wow. Some enterprising fellow in Austria, (allegedly named Hans Url, so this may be a hoax) faced with the heinous prospect of having to get off the dole and go to work, cut his foot off with a power saw, tossed it into a fire so that it could not be re-attached, and then called emergency services.

Unfortunately for him, missing a foot does not automatically keep you on the dole, even in Austria!

Let's break it down:

(1) People, they can't pay the guy benefits after that, right? Jeebus, the whole country would go cut their feet off then!

(2) The linked article refers to the miscreant as "footless". Is this just a slip of the pen, or has the guy actually DONE THIS BEFORE?

(3) The gentleman is from a town in the Austrian state of Styria, which if you are a fan of Thomas Bernhard, should be making you nod your head knowingly and murmuring "it figures".

When Irish eyes are smiling

The Irish should love the Greeks. After all, it's got to be nice not being on the bottom of the heap of Euro-countries.

Yet they seem to enjoy screwing with them nonetheless.

Aer Lingus has been making folks with Greek passports take written language tests in Greek before letting them board flights to Ireland.

All good clean fun until they did it to this lady taking a flight from Barcelona to Ireland.

One of the many great parts of the story is that no one at the Aer Lingus desk in Barcelona could read Greek, nor did it appear they had an answer key on the premises.

I think I could have passed the test under those circumstances. Years of teaching econometrics has left me overly familiar with the Greek alphabet.

Hat tip to Mrs. Angus.

The Culture that is Pakistan

In a written submission, the Ministry of Law and Justice said that under Sharia law, children become adults at the onset of puberty which varied under a range of factors making it impossible to increase the age for criminal responsibility:

 "It can be well understood that attainment of maturity of understanding depends on social, economic, climatic, dietary and environmental factors, that's why a child in our subcontinent starts understanding nature and consequences of his/her conduct much earlier than a child in the west specially because of general poverty, hot climate, exotic and spicy food which contribute towards speedy physical and mental growth of the child," it said. 

This remarkable statement was issued to explain why the ministry was against raising the age of criminal responsibility in the country from 7 (where it currently stands) to 12.

 The source article is here and the hat tip goes to Roving Bandit.

Now I know whats wrong with the youth of America. Not enough hot sauce!!

When cannons are outlawed....

From the LA Times:

"Authorities said the cannonball that struck and killed a 33-year-old woman in San Diego County was homemade and that alcohol was involved in the incident.


 The woman's husband and another man were working on a cannon shortly after midnight outside the couple's mobile home when it exploded, according to a Cal-Fire spokesman. One of the two men was sent to the hospital with minor injuries.


The incident is being investigated by the San Diego County Sheriff's Department.


Few details were immediately available, and it's unclear exactly what killed the woman. The incident occurred in a mobile home park in Potrero on the Mexican border."

Here I go people, I just can't help myself:

1. A "homemade cannonball"? Really?

2. I don't think alcohol was the only problem.

3. There is a really severe contradiction in the first and last 'grafs of the article: "cannonball struck and killed" vs. "unclear exactly what killed". Get a grip, LA Times

4. This incident reminded me of one of my favorite songs and videos of all time:






Hat tip to RKG

No Sh*t, Sherlock

Hey. Do you know what is the favorite food of people that live in India?

Well it's INDIAN food!

How 'bout Mexico?

You guessed it, MEXICAN!

Now, do you know the moronic NGO that paid $$ to find this out?

Well, it's OXFAM (scroll down to the "top 3 foods by country" table).

Nice job guys, really good use of $$ and really fascinating findings. Don't know what we'd do without you.

Apparently, there's three kinds of people in this world.

The mystery of Yglesias

Matty Y has put up a mysterious blog post called "The non-mystery of the recession".

He shows this graph:

And then says "As for the current recession, this just goes to emphasize how non-mysterious everything is"

And that to me is mysterious!

Is he saying the fall in consumption explains the fall in GDP (rather than vice versa or both being caused by a third factor)?

Or is he saying that the current recession is typical of US recessions?

People, the recession we have endured and its aftereffects are anything but non-mysterious.

GDP and consumption usually snap back to trend relatively quickly after a recession in the USA. The current case, where GDP and consumption are moving along a path parallel to but below the original trend is rare and, dare I say it, mysterious.

Either Matty is too deep for me, or Matty doesn't know what the word "mystery" means (or both I guess could be true).

The partners from Hell

Mrs. A and I have returned from two weeks in Uganda. It was a fantastic trip. We saw and did so much, I'm still kind of trying to process it all (and get over the jet lag).

However, one negative element of the trip was the incredibly disfunctional partnership between Delta and KLM. We flew OKC-ATL-AMS-EBB out and EBB-AMS-DET-OKC back. The full round trip was code-shared by both airlines, with KLM equipment on the flights in and out of Amsterdam and the rest with Delta equipment.

The first issue was that it turned out to be impossible to use frequent flyer miles to cover the flights. Not because there weren't seats, but because Delta said they couldn't get seats on the KLM provided flights and KLM said they couldn't get seats on the Delta provided flights. So it wasn't exactly true that we couldn't use frequent flyer miles, we just would have had to use twice as many as it should have been.

The next issue was that if you booked the flights with KLM you could only get amenities on the KLM provided flights (upgrades, special meals, priority boarding). If you booked with Delta, you could only get them on the Delta provided flights. This turned out to even be the case with seat assignments!

People, it is so bad that you are not even informed of SCHEDULE CHANGES on the flights provided by whichever company that you didn't book with!

At least KLM flew a modern plane with personal entertainment systems and such. The Delta equipment from AMS to DET was an ancient 747 with a couple of TV screens bolted to the ceiling.

More on the fun parts of the trip later.

Minnesota: Behold your Senator!

I expect moronic stuff like this from Senator Al Franken, but I am actually a little bit surprised at Ezra Klein's cheerleading.

Ezra, in his WAPO column proposes some "no brainers", proposed legislation that everyone should be able to agree on.

According to him, no-brainer #4 is the Franken-sponsored "Pay for War Act".

As Franken puts it, "war shouldn't add to the deficit".

Now, I'm guessing Al is opposed to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (me too!!), but that is just a completely idiotic principle.

People, in WWII the deficit reached 25% of GDP. Good thing for us Al Franken wasn't in office then!

"Gee whiz Hirohito, we sure don't like what you're doing, but we've about maxed out this year's tax revenues and hey, war shouldn't add to the deficit, so......."

Look at this picture and then reflect on the fact that Al Franken is a US Senator (clic the pic for a more glorious image)!

WWI and WWII stick out like wagging fingers rebuking Senator Al (and his boy Ezra).

If the US is in a war that poses a serious threat, we need to be able to spend whatever it takes to win. That's just common sense, as Al likes to say.

Trying to hamstring the future defense of this country as a reaction to the current situation certainly is a no-brainer, just not in the way Ezra means the term.

I heart Benjamins!

Bennett McCallum says that we shouldn't raise inflation targets to avoid the zero bound problem because "Present institutional arrangements are not immutable. In particular, elimination of traditional currency is feasible (even arguably attractive) and would remove the ZLB constraint on policy."

Wow, thanks Ben (and all the others of your ilk).

Making currency illegal so the government can impose negative rates of return on all conceivable assets is such a dumb idea that only a highly trained economist could call it "arguably attractive".

There is little enough anonymity and privacy left in these United States of ours; let's not get rid of the last remaining shreds under the guise of "improving the performance of monetary policy".

Or, to put it another way, Big Brother is already plenty big enough!

Hot Links

1. The grading season is upon us, get fired up here! "he urines to be accepted".

2. Deflection: S&P is now running Greece (according to its Prime Minister)!

3. Grand concession: AG Eric Holder admits that not all price rises are not prima facie illegal!

4. Nice graphs from John Taylor in the WSJ.

College hoops sucks

Good Lord. In the national title game, UCON shot 34% from the field, WHICH WAS ALMOST DOUBLE Butler's 18%. I am so glad I didn't watch that abomination. In fact, I made the whole year without watching a single college game, and I am pretty sure I'll never watch another one (unless Pluto somehow gets a scholarship).

As the blogosphere turns

Jeez. This is a weird mess. First, on Saturday, the NYTimes runs an article called "The lucky break of rent stabilization", which details the ups and downs of negotiations between tenants and developers over buyouts. Then N.G. Mankiw links to it for textbook promotion under essentially the same title, "The lucky break of rent control"

Here's NG's entire text:

For those instructors teaching about the economics of rent control (Chapter 6 of my favorite textbook) or the Coase Theorem (Chapter 10), this article about buyouts of rent stabilized tenants should generate a good class discussion.

Just your typical NG book plug, right? Nothing to see here.

But then, some blogger named Buce just goes off on NG with a post called "Mankiw's luck"

Here are some excerpts:

"Honestly, I sometimes wonder why this guy (i.e. NGM) gets taken seriously, but I suppose I know: he plays into every instinct for smug self-satisfaction that you would expect among cosseted, comfortable Harvard students--and that you would want a proper education to beat out of them."

Always good to start out with some non-germane mudslinging, Buce, please go on:

"Now strictly speaking, I am no great fan of rent control: I think it often does more (social) harm than good. But "luck"? Why is rent control more a "lucky break" than being born blond, beautiful, Norwegian and blessed with great ski-jumping skills? "

Umm, neither NG nor the NY Times article that he links to say anything like "rent control is the only form of luck that the human race can get". I think we can probably agree that since rent stabilized apartments aren't means tested or anything, it actually is lucky to be able to get one. but surely there's more to your complaint than NG didn't provide an exhaustive list of lucky things that can happen to humans:

Maybe I've got other friends who, say, bought apartments in the East 60s back in the Dinkins administration when those puppies were going for $65k a pop, tops. I suppose Mankiw might want me to think that those buyers (as distinct from those renters) were operating out of pluck and foresight and deserve every penny of the appreciation that they've enjoyed. I doubt it. I suspect that most of them were hard-working strivers who wanted to live in a nice place (considering) and got, well, lucky. Does Mankiw spend a class hour trying to delegitimatize their hold on good fortune, to figuring out ways of clawing it back from them?

Wow, WTF is this about? Again neither NG or the Times article says anything pro or con about price appreciation for homeowners! This guy/gal is basically unhinged.

NG must have taken a full Austin Powers right in the middle of Buce's cornflakes at some point.

Ok you say, that's amazingly bad, but hey, it's just some creepy corner of the interwebs, only NG fanboys like me (LOL) would ever find it.

Well actually I found it because Mark Thoma the king of econ blog links decided for some inscrutable reason to link to it! Why, Mark, why? Don't hate the Playa!

Thomas Friedman gives us his philosophy of life

He sums it up for you at the very end and it's well worth watching the whole thing!

People: Do NOT eat Wheaties!!

Because from what I learned today, they make you very, very, very dumb.

Let me break it down for you. First, Tyler sends me to a Brad Delong post about medicare. Then I see a link to another Delong post called "Joe Klein has really eaten his Wheaties today". Intrigued, I checked it out, only to come to the horrifying discovery that Wheaties must be really bad for your brain.

Here's Klein:

Perhaps it isn't a coincidence that so many of the people whinnying the loudest are prominent members of the financial community, the sector that has had the most to do with hollowing out our manufacturing base....

People, you just know that this bizarre claim is submitted without any evidence or proof! It's a real head-scratcher. The Goldman-Sachs destroyed our manufacturing sector? Really? How? This is nuts.

Here's more Klein:

There is, for example, Glenn Hubbard, who was featured on the New York Times op-ed page recently in defense of the deficit commission, describing the problem this way: "We have designed entitlements for a welfare state we cannot afford." This is the same Glenn Hubbard who served as George W. Bush's chief economic adviser when Dick Cheney was saying that "Reagan proved deficits don't matter." One imagines that if Hubbard was so concerned about deficits, he might have resigned in protest from an Administration dedicated to creating them.

Wow. First, one can easily and logically consistently believe both of the following: (A) Our entitlement programs are unaffordable and (B) deficits don't matter.

Saying entitlements are unaffordable means you want entitlement spending cut. It's the SPENDING THAT MATTERS. Deficits, to a first approximation are future taxes so, yes one could hold the view that, while deficits don't matter, spending does, and the future path of our entitlement programs put us on a path to too high spending.

I am an example of someone who believes both (A) and (B) above, so is Milton Friedman.

Look, I am not a Glenn Hubbard fan by any stretch of the imagination, but there is really nothing necessarily hypocritical in simultaneously espousing the two views being attributed to him by the wheat-and-milk-addled Klein.

The last bit, that anyone who didn't resign from the Bush administration has no legitimate standing to discuss future entitlement spending, is just plain asinine.

People, Brad is a smart guy, so I figure he knows Klein is full of it. Thus I view his post as an elliptical, but important PSA on the ill effects that Wheaties have on brain function.

Thanks Brad!

Free-trade Theatre

People, we have met the enemy, and he is us. Only in the wonderland world of Democratic party politics can a President visit a country with which we ALREADY HAVE A SIGNED FTA and come out saying that he failed to reach a trade deal!

At first I thought I'd started down the road to dementia or insanity: "no deal? Wow, I thought we signed one back in 2007, I must be losing my mind".

Well, some people have, and I don't think I'm one of them (at least not in this case!).

Obama travels the earth proclaiming we are going to double our exports, but refuses to push for Congressional action on already signed FTAs that on balance open foreign markets more to us than ours to the other country.

I guess that vaguely positive double-talk about the benefits of trade is better than the "renegotiate NAFTA" rhetoric that came from candidate Obama, but it is still pathetic.