She Wanted to Be "Ready" For the Visit

As authorities nationwide warn motorists of the dangers of driving while texting, Florida Keys law enforcement officers add a new caution: Don't try to shave your privates, either.

Florida Highway Patrol troopers say a two-vehicle crash Tuesday at Mile Marker 21 on Cudjoe Key was caused by a 37-year-old woman driver who was shaving her bikini area while her ex-husband took the wheel from the passenger seat.

"She said she was meeting her boyfriend in Key West and wanted to be ready for the visit," Trooper Gary Dunick said.

The whole story is worth reading. My home state....

There are many things I like about the story. But the best parts, for my money, are that she was getting her ex-husband to drive from the passenger seat. While she sat in the driver's seat (why?), shaving her tingly bits. To be "ready" for her boyfriend. With a suspended license. In an illegal car.

(Nod to LS)

Good news for people who love bad news

Yes, the economy lost more jobs last month, and yes the unemployment rate is still 9.7%, but in some sense this is what qualifies as "good news" these days. Job losses were predicted to be higher and the unemployment rate was predicted to rise, so this qualifies as a "better than expected" jobs report.

I continue to think that the economy is turning the corner and that we are more likely to get a faster than predicted recovery than we are to get a double dip recession.

I also think that the biggest threat to a robust recovery is not a lack of further government action, but rather the threat of further government action in the form of higher taxes on corporations and entrepreneurs. 

 

 

Must be the capitalism!

African Poverty is Falling...Much Faster than You Think!

Xavier Sala-i-Martin & Maxim Pinkovskiy
NBER Working Paper, February 2010

Abstract: The conventional wisdom that Africa is not reducing poverty is wrong. Using the methodology of Pinkovskiy and Sala-i-Martin (2009), we estimate income distributions, poverty rates, and inequality and welfare indices for African countries for the period 1970-2006. We show that: (1) African poverty is falling and is falling rapidly; (2) if present trends continue, the poverty Millennium Development Goal of halving the proportion of people with incomes less than one dollar a day will be achieved on time; (3) the growth spurt that began in 1995 decreased African income inequality instead of increasing it; (4) African poverty reduction is remarkably general: it cannot be explained by a large country, or even by a single set of countries possessing some beneficial geographical or historical characteristic. All classes of countries, including those with disadvantageous geography and history, experience reductions in poverty. In particular, poverty fell for both landlocked as well as coastal countries; for mineral-rich as well as mineral-poor countries; for countries with favorable or with unfavorable agriculture; for countries regardless of colonial origin; and for countries with below- or above-median slave exports per capita during the African slave trade.

(Nod to Kevin L)

Not Funny

Striking a little too close to home....

How Will The End Of Print Journalism Affect Old Loons Who Hoard Newspapers?

No Way to Go

Man electrocuted urinating on live 2400V power line.

That's "no way to go."

Owie owie owie.

(Nod to Angry Alex)

Marking down the mark up

Potentially very cool new NBER working paper by Cúrdia and Reiss (ungated version here) argues that once you allow the exogenous shocks in DSGE models to be correlated, fluctuations in the mark up become less important in explaining business cycles.  

Here, let them tell it:

The dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models that are used to study business cycles typically assume that exogenous disturbances are independent autoregressions of order one. This paper relaxes this tight and arbitrary restriction, by allowing for disturbances that have a rich contemporaneous and dynamic correlation structure. Our first contribution is a new Bayesian econometric method that uses conjugate conditionals to make the estimation of DSGE models with correlated disturbances feasible and quick. Our second contribution is a re-examination of U.S. business cycles. We find that allowing for correlated disturbances resolves some conflicts between estimates from DSGE models and those from vector autoregressions, and that a key missing ingredient in the models is countercyclical fiscal policy. According to our estimates, government spending and technology disturbances play a larger role in the business cycle than previously ascribed, while changes in markups are less important.

Well done sirs. Kudos!

  

 

Mankiw's Theorem

Greg M asserts, without proof, the following claim:

Feckless > Counterproductive

I think that he is right, though. The proof is left as an exercise for the reader.

(Nod to the Bishop)

Another Earthquake in Chile

Huge Aftershocks in Chile

Tsunami warnings....

The secret to true happiness

Mungowitz's shocking secret revealed!

People, legal newsline has broken this story wide open. I just can't believe it, but there it is in black and white.

When Mungo and I were in grad school together, I was always tagging along behind him as he worked the system, made friends, charmed the professors, and pretty much got whatever he wanted (I was basically a spiky simmering ball of resentment and sarcasm the whole time).

But apparently I actually did A LOT BETTER than he at Wash U, as the story makes clear:

"Munger earned his master's degree in economics at Washington University in St. Louis and worked as a staff economist at the Federal Trade Commission. A Libertarian who received 3 percent of the 2008 vote for governor, Munger is also the head of the political science department at Duke."

I was somehow under the impression that both of us got our PhDs from good old don't wash me, Wash U.

Mungo, you got some 'splainin' to do!

ps. maybe Avanash K. Dixit retroactively revoked your doctorate?