but enough about you...

....let's talk about me!

Over at MR, folks are peppering LeBron with requests for posts.

One request that really struck me was, "What’s the most important economics question you ever asked?"

At a facile level, it's, "why are some nations so rich and others so poor?", but I can't claim any originality there as it was asked many, many times before I got there. I'm guessing the commenter meant an original question.

The next contender would be, "why do macroeconomists ignore politics?". Here I was a little less un-original, but several others were before me.

I guess the closest thing to an original economics question I've asked is, "if we want to study growth, why are we throwing away information by using cross-sectional averages instead of panels?"

p.s. if you have requests for posts from Mungo or me, please put them in the comments and we'll see what we can do. At least here, your odds of getting chosen are much much higher!

It's all in the (sow) genes

Idaho pig farmer (and James Carville look-alike) Lindy Hinkelman has won over $300,000 in the last 3 years playing fantasy baseball.

Lindy says pig-farming is good training for baseball management:

"Raising pigs and this baseball thing really go together," he told the Times. "There are certain things in farming -- keeping track of productivity, indexes for your sows, the genetic lines there."

Time for an Angus breakdown:

This is just one of many reasons why the internet is so great. Isolated, useless, genius can emerge and be rewarded.

I think pig farming would help real world baseball executives by getting them accustomed to how players behave.

The accomplishment seems remarkable, but given the innumerable number of fantasy leagues and players, wouldn't we expect something like this to happen at some point? Is it really pig-inspired baseball genius or is it more like a guy winning the lottery twice in a row (see Kahneman on the illusion of skill)?