From a poll published yesterday by WorldPublicOpinion.org:
Not that surprising in general: Everybody knows Asians and Americans like capitalism best. Although the Africans are up there too!
The huge gap between France on the one side and Germany and Italy on the other surprised me. And what’s up with Turkey?
The general global …
So my husband and I were listening to NPR this morning over breakfast when we heard this snippet:
For the first time, Spain’s newly re-elected prime minister has announced a 17-member cabinet that has more women than men. One of them is Spain’s first female defense minister, who is also seven months pregnant. Her appointment is causing
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Former Curious Capitalist guest blogger Mark Gimein has a nice scaremongering piece in Slate (or is it on Slate? At Slate?) about the next mortgage shoe to drop: affluent Californians with option ARMs.
The most common subprime loans were known as “2/28” in the industry: 30 years, including a two-year teaser rate before the interest rate
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After gently bashing the Straight Talking One yesterday, it seems only fair to share this little bit from Jonathan Rauch’s defense, from the May Atlantic, of John McCain as a Burkean (as in Edmund Burke) conservative:
McCain voted against Bush’s big tax cuts, but now says he supports extending them rather than risking damage to the
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I already posted on McCain’s gas-tax-holiday proposal. But what about the other things he said in his big economy speech in Pittsburgh today? Here’s my summary of the main points, with my commentary in italics.
1) Jimmy Cayne and Angelo Mozilo are naughty men who got paid lots of money for being naughty. But I’m not going to actually …
So I guess John McCain has decided to write off the subway riders’ (and bicyclists’, and Prius drivers’) vote. In a big economic speech this morning he said:
I propose that the federal government suspend all taxes on gasoline now paid by the American people — from Memorial Day to Labor Day of this year. The effect will be an immediate
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Growing up, I was made to go to church every week without fail. The experience left me with deep psychological scars. Here’s one, according to a new study: having gone to church regularly apparently makes me work harder.
Researchers at the University of Georgia found that women who had attended religious services frequently (at least
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Arnold Kling writes:
My daughter who is a freshman left a message that she wants me to explain macro to her. I can do that, in the sense that I can teach what is in her textbook. In reality, however, macro is a muddle that no one can explain. The undergraduate textbook, a graduate textbook, and macroeconomics as practiced by policymakers
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The clock ticks inexorably toward midnight, and Chris and I are nowhere near completing our taxes. Again.
It’s not that we’re mindless procrastinators. We’re both in deadline-oriented lines of work—mine featuring actual deadlines, his the deadline of a performance time. We work hard. We meet our responsbilities. We take out our …
Just after 5 p.m. today. That’s right: 102,512 words of popularized-financial-theory fun, not counting voluminous endnotes. I think that’s about 290 standard-size book pages. The last three or four may well be complete gibberish, but who the heck reads that far anyway?
So yeah, the blogging ought to be better from here on out.
While in Japan my main connection to the news was my Pop’s Daily Yomiuri, which is a crap newspaper if ever one existed. The headlines are convoluted and grammatically horrifying; its front page is apparently selected by a committee of old Japanese dudes who have no clue what makes for relevant news to an international audience. Take the …
Here’s something I sure didn’t know, from Business Week’s Michael Mandel:
What the government calls “personal consumption” is actually a grab bag of items, some of which don’t really fit the usual notion of consumer spending. For example, the nation’s current annual personal consumption of $10 trillion includes about $1.8 trillion in
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