The Ambrosini Critique

(h/t Roger Bourland)

“Consumer spending in the U.S. increased at the slowest pace in six months”¹

In other news, sales of Christmas trees are at their lowest level since last January.

1. Bloomberg [↩]

Just as I love democracy, so do I love Chiles in Nogada. But I do not ask that Chiles in Nogada can solve most of the world’s problems or for that matter get me to work in the morning.

— Tyler Cowen

Actually, because Excel sucks, I only ran 13026 elections (xls, 4.5 megs).

My predictions for next Tuesday:

• Obama will definitely win Illinois
• He will probably win Colorado and Georgia (> 65% chance to win each)
• He will definitely lose Massachusetts and Oklahoma
• Connecticut is a close call
• He’ll probably lose the rest (< 38% chance)
• He will win 44-50% of the total delegates
• He’s not likely to win super Tuesday (i.e. get more than 50% of the delegates), but it definitely won’t knock him out of the race
• 1/3rd of my predictions will be wrong

That’s it. I’m done with this election crap. I got to write my first VBA script though…

It’s up in the air because McCain’s appeal to independents cancels the problems with being a Republican in 2008, while Hillary’s negatives cancel out the advantages of being the Democrat in 2008.

— fabio

Well, enduring through November at least…

I’ve updated my presidential ordering. I added a technology column (duh, why didn’t I have that before) and I based my rankings in that category on this techcrunch post. The results:

1. John McCain (67%)
2. Barack Obama (66%)
3. Mitt Romney (65%)
4. Rudy Giuliani (58%)
5. Mike Huckabee (45%)
6. John Edwards (38%)
7. Hillary Clinton (31%)

The percent number in parenthesis is the percentage of the ideal candidate. This makes it much easier to see how close the top 3 candidates are for me. Notice also how I was able to push Obama into the top two and McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee, is number one.

UPDATE: In a flash, it just hit me how nice of an election season it would be with Obama and McCain the nominees.

Wikipedia has this article featured on its front page today. Reading through the article I came across the phrase “hair shirt”. I vaguely recalled seeing this object being referred to at crooked timber and not knowing what it meant. I imagined at the time I had assumed it was some colorful foreign English witticism; they have a bunch of Aussies and Irish blogging over there.

Having now learned what hair shirt means, I went over to crooked timber to see my new vocab word used in context. Apparently, I completely fabricated the whole memory. Only one result is returned for searches on all variations of possible spellings of the phrase (e.g. “hair shirt”, “hairshirt”, “hair-shirt”, etc) and that one result is an entry that was posted earlier than when I began regularly reading the site. Oh, well.

Having a look around, though, it became apparent that Crooked Timber was much, much better way back then. Take a look at this entry, the one containing “hair shirt”:

The conventional wisdom of the late 1990s was that the New Economy was an unprecedented miracle about to transform us forever. The conventional wisdom after the party ended and the recession and scandals began was that it had all been “a mix of collective folly and outright criminality.” Henwood insists it was neither. From the first page he argues that the New Economy circus emerged “from the innards of the American economic machinery,” as something that capitalism brought forth from within itself, and not for the first time. Though he doesn’t say it directly, he also wants to get across the idea that, in Marx’s phrase, “Capital is a social relation of production.” This is just the conviction that—exotic financial instruments, global capital flows and the complexity of modern market economies notwithstanding—the world of money is rooted in concrete social relationships between people. A capitalist market economy is not a neutral system governed by immutable laws of nature. Rather, even the powerful forces of supply and demand work within institutional contexts and cultural conventions. More than simply distortions or impediments to the workings of the economy, these contexts help constitute what the market is, and play a vital role in deciding how the social product is distributed, who gets exposed to the risks of economic life, and what positions are available within the social structure. There is substantial room for political choice—and political conflict—on each of these dimensions.

Informative, even handed, non-flame-y. I like.

Anyway, I dug around the archives a little and came across this review of Tyler Cowen’s macro writings at volokh.com (where he spent most of his time before MR’s birth):

I simply could not let this post pass without comment. It’s part one of a “Guide to Macroeconomics in Five Easy Lessons”, on monetary economics. I wholeheartedly support the idea of someone producing such a guide, but the actual statements made about monetary economics seem to me to be horribly confused. So much so that I’ve been reduced to commenting on it line-by-line; I wanted to write a proper response, but grew worried that by concentrating on my main disagreements, I would be implicitly endorsing some of the errors I didn’t single out.

And this comment is a gem:

He’s [Cowen] also written a book on Austrian theories of the business cycle which I rather like, but that hasn’t stopped him writing some terrible rubbish about that. Popularisation’s a gift. Either you’ve got it (like Krugman) or you haven’t.

Tyler, ye of little popularization gifts, went on to found the Marginal Revolution blog which currently reaches about 3 times as many people as crookedtimber.org and, I believe, is the most popular economics blog on the internets.

Over a hundred years before the Wealth of Nations, Sam Pepys:

To another question of mine he made me fully understand that the old law of prohibiting bullion to be exported, is, and ever was a folly and an injury, rather than good. Arguing thus, that if the exportations exceed importations, then the balance must be brought home in money, which, when our merchants know cannot be carried out again, they will forbear to bring home in money, but let it lie abroad for trade, or keepe in foreign banks: or if our importations exceed our exportations, then, to keepe credit, the merchants will and must find ways of carrying out money by stealth, which is a most easy thing to do, and is every where done; and therefore the law against it signifies nothing in the world. Besides, that it is seen, that where money is free, there is great plenty; where it is restrained, as here, there is a great want, as in Spayne.