There is a new Tinker book. The world is a happy place.

School holidays, so time to write and think. Have drafted a piece on the origin and use of money, a companion to Easy Guide to Monetary Policy; a couple of economists have kindly agreed to read and comment on it for me before I post.

Greatly enjoyed drwhacky's dinner party last Wednesday ( Read more... )

Some troublemaker has written an Easy Guide to Monetary Policy.

And in the spirit of the excellent Beware of Greeks Bearing Bonds, a nice piece on Greece’s ambiguous placement in terms of being Western, developed and modern.

Sean Penn has decided to resurrect the Falklands issue (denouncing British "colonialism": the current, happily British, inhabitants are the descendants of the original settlers of the islands), which had led to some amusing comments. While I liked:
As somebody else pointed out elsewhere, it’s time for Penn to give his Malibu home back to the ( Read more... )

An Irish journalist treats a European Central Bank (ECB) bureaudroid with the contempt he deserves.

I am not a fan of the Euro: even less of the ECB. Oz is doing much better than Japan, the US or the Eurozone mainly because our central bank is not mad.

As eurogeddon approaches, and a serious economist wonders if the European Central Bank qualifies for a Darwin Award, an operatic scene satirising bankers provides light relief.

Was in the city yesterday (Saturday), walking along Lonsdale St and, stopped for the traffic at a traffic island, heard the young man of East Asian descent with spiky hair holding the hand of a very pale, blonde girlfriend say into his mobile phone "What do you want to do, bro?" So does globalisation makes cosmopolitans of us all (to varying ( Read more... )

More on single motherhood and the market for marriage (including the dearth of reliable men).

An amusing YouTube on “saving money like Uncle Sam”.

An animation explaining nominal GDP targeting.

Graphs of economic projections for India, China and … The paper (pdf). There has been massive drops in (pdf) global poverty in recent years, mainly (but ( Read more... )

Commodity price index back to 1749.

Graphs allowing the comparing the fall in US spending on goods and services in 1929-33 to that during the “Great Recession”. Showing that the fall in US spending on goods and services during the Great Recession was by far the largest since 1960.

Arguing that the Copernican analogy actually shows how economics ( Read more... )

About Norway’s “gentle” system not coping with a mass murderer.

About the riots, poor policing and breakdown in the UK’s work and reward system. The English riots and a wider class war.

Drug use is declining in the UK among young adults.

Fear in Brussels. The likelihood of a Greek default is rising. Predicting a request for the US to bail out ( Read more... )

An economic argument about why there are more “man-childs” around.

Hayek on economics and knowledge:
Correct foresight is then not, as it has sometimes been understood, a precondition which must exist in order that equilibrium may be arrived at. It is rather the defining characteristic of a state of equilibrium ( Read more... )