Wednesday, December 31, 2008
On the Carnival of the Africans #5
Posted by Simon Halliday | Wednesday, December 31, 2008 | Category:
Carnival of the Africans,
Scepticism,
South Africa
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0
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Below, my comments on some of the recent pieces from the Carnival of the Africans #5. Michael of Irreverence shares a piece I had intended to comment on previously: 7 Myths about the SA Economy. I enjoyed his summary. I disagree with Cronin and Nzimande on the 'scientific' nature of Marx, but still believe that he made occasional relevant points (as exemplified in work by Stiglitz, Bowles and others).The Skeptic Detective discusses an encounter with Tarot Reading....
One of my classmates is Palestinian. When he and I are not studying together in Italy, He lives in Ramallah with his wife, child and family. Although he is not close to Gaza, the violence in the region is overflowing into the West Bank in small ways. He told me, in email communications, of violence close to his home in which clashes between Israeli soldiers and members of the public is becoming more common. Recently, these clashes were within 100 meters of his home....
Sunday, December 28, 2008
Carnival of the Africans #5
Posted by Simon Halliday | Sunday, December 28, 2008 | Category:
Carnival of the Africans,
Scepticism
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2
comments
Owen Swart of 01 and the universe is hosting the fifth Carnival of the Africans. I have not read the pieces yet, but wanted to promote the carnival. Go and have a look. I will read and tell you of the posts that I enjoyed. I admit that I have been quiet of late because of work and teaching summer term, but I hope to have a couple of interesting pieces on Neuroeconomics up for the next carnival (Mike hold me to this!).Anyway, it is also necessary for me to update...
Friday, December 26, 2008
I know this makes me 'sound like an economist', but I am in favour of the low-priced, profit-driven provision of support for those in need. Specifically the targeting of 'poor' individuals for goods that they require, but at prices that still allow a business to run, for example the provision of mosquito nets, or paid toilets or others. Al Roth comments on this (initially in reference to an article by Nicholas Kristof, but anyway), and, in general, I am with him. ...
Tuesday, December 23, 2008
This Makes Me Happy
Posted by Simon Halliday | Tuesday, December 23, 2008 | Category:
Political Philosophy
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comments
The UN general assembly signed in a declaration for the universal decriminalization of homosexuality. The action was opposed by the US, the Holy See and by a conglomeration of Islamic Countries. Anyway, I understand that this kind of thing is not binding, but it is a step in the right direction for the promotion of LGBT rights. I am in favour.See the article from the UN Dispatch he...
Friday, December 12, 2008
I have not commented on books that I have read for quite some time. Here are a few paragraphs on a selection of books that I've read since last posting on the topic. Shakespeare by Bill Bryson: Bryson is always good to read and this book didn't disappoint. I reveled in the little anecdotes about the context in which Shakespeare wrote. I remain convinced (as Bryons is) that Shakespeare wrote the plays, but lament the fact that we don’t have more documentary evidence...
Tuesday, December 09, 2008
Positive Feedbacks
Posted by Simon Halliday | Tuesday, December 09, 2008 | Category:
Economics Education,
South Africa
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2
comments
Not necessarily what I will get from my students after prescribing them actual (shock! horror!) reading for ECO2003P, but hey. Anyway, the reason I mention this is that while lecturing in Intermediate Micro one of the subjects that I cover with the students is that of monopoly power through network externalities, increasing returns, lock-in and specific, or irreversible, investment. The discussion is based on two articles both very easy to read:W. Brian Arthur, 'Positive...
Monday, December 08, 2008
Back in CT
Posted by Simon Halliday | Monday, December 08, 2008 | Category:
South Africa
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4
comments
So after some time travelling, arriving back in SA, going up to Plett for a few days and then arriving back in Cape Town I am now lecturing ECO2003P, intermediate microeconomics, for the Summer Term at UCT. Joy! Well at least it pays for flights and a bit more.Anyway, my hiatus was as a consequence of said travels. Coming back to SA has been surprising in terms of realising the effects of inflation, but also talking to people who are remarkably positive about the...
Friday, November 28, 2008
Ariely, Foster and CEOs
Posted by Simon Halliday | Friday, November 28, 2008 | Category:
Mechanism Design,
Microeconomics
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0
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Dan Ariely recently published a short op-ed in the NYT, arguing that excessive wages basically encourage laziness (gross simplification). Peter Foster of the FP responds. I thought it worthwhile to add my 2c have just written my most difficult exam this quarter (Advanced Game Theory) and feeling jubilant and like my opinion is worth something. My other reason for commenting is that I am currently three quarters of the way through Ariely's (audio) book Predictably...
Wednesday, November 26, 2008
Sex/Partner Markets
Posted by Simon Halliday | Wednesday, November 26, 2008 | Category:
Mechanism Design,
Microeconomics
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0
comments
Two items on the agenda. First, the UK has introduced new legislation preventing 'forced' marriages. One would have thought that marriage in the UK would have had to be voluntary, but supposedly this was not the case - especially for families of Middle Eastern heritage. The question is, will this result in fewer marriages in those groups at which the legislation is targeted? Will it result in more antipathy towards the British Government from targeted groups because...
Jeffrey Sachs - What Obama Needs To DoJeffrey Sachs - A Worldwide Vision of Sustainable RecoveryKrugman - Franklin Delano ObamaKrugman - Depression Economics ReturnsRobert Frank - A Tax on ConsumptionMichael Hirsh - Barack The Savior?Duncan Green - What Needs to Happen At the G20 SummitDaniel Gross - The Subprime Good GuysPeter Draper - South African Objectives at the G20Robert Shiller - Reviving the Animal SpiritsTyler Cowen - The New Deal Didn't Always Work, EitherEconoclast...
Monday, November 24, 2008
I didn't think it was that hifalutin, hoity-toity, nampy-pamby, academicky, nerdy... But, then again I am an economist and we regularly make bad assumptio...
Sunday, November 23, 2008
Hard-line Economists?
Posted by Simon Halliday | Sunday, November 23, 2008 | Category:
Macroeconomics,
Rhetoric
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0
comments
Ed Glaeser, in his recent piece in the NYT, talks about how,Hard-line economists argue that Detroit lost its way decades ago, and that government support for this industry will be worse than wasteful.What he actually means is hard-line, the-market-is-perfect-no-it-really-is-flawless right-wing economists who believe that market forces dominate everything and there is no space for government intervention in markets. I am not arguing here that government intervention...
Friday, November 21, 2008
Prospect Theory
Posted by Simon Halliday | Friday, November 21, 2008 | Category:
Decision Theory,
Microeconomics
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0
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One of my courses this quarter was dedicated to decision theory and behavioral economics. Decision Theory has its roots in the axiomatisation proposed by Von Neumann and Morgenstern and is based on 'objective' probabilities, such as a fair coin flip in their Theory of Games and Economic Behavior. Savage proposed an alternative in his Foundations of Statistics that incorporated the notion of subjective probabilities based on individuals having their own perception of...
I thought I'd mention briefly some of the reasons I decided against playing rugby here in Italy. First, I thought that I was misunderstanding the political positions and locations of certain individuals because of poor Italian. I also misunderstood several other things, which I will mention in a moment. Initially I stopped playing because I was injured and I had too much work with the PhD. Later, I decided not to return because of politics and racism. Oh well...This...
Thursday, November 20, 2008
Paying for Sperm?
Posted by Simon Halliday | Thursday, November 20, 2008 | Category:
Mechanism Design,
Microeconomics
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0
comments
Take a look at this post by Daniel Hamermesh at the Freakonomics Blog. The second comment, by a lady named Rachel argues for the introduction of material incentives, i.e. payment, for sperm in the UK. Such incentives are already in place in the US and, as far as I know, involve drug screening and, obviously, screening for STDs.Another comment, further down the page mirrors the comment that I made earlier in reference to payment for organs and the Tittmus problem. ...
Obviously one of the things I was assuming in my first post was that material incentives (money) will result in increased supply of organs by individuals. This may be an incorrect assumption. For example, Richard Titmuss did research on blood donations in the UK and showed that the introduction of payments reduced donations, i.e. overall supply. Which means that the mechanism to be implemented needs to have a nuanced design such that it does not crowd-out donations...
Singapore is planning to pay organ donors (at least for kidney transplants and eggs). I know doctors balk at the idea, but there is horrendous loss of life currently because doctors and hospitals refuse to allow payments for organs by private institutions or by non-governmental organisations that might elect to provide organs for donor-patient matches. I really think that (regulated) moves in this direction are a good idea. Question: will this result in a substantial...
Thursday, November 13, 2008
We have a voluntary extra-curricular reading group here at Siena organise by one of the young assistant professors, Giulio Zanella. The idea is that we should each present a paper approximately once every couple of months, while ensuring that we read the papers that others present. We generally present for about 1-1 1/2 hours and then try to chat about the paper for the 30 minutes following that.Anyway, this past Tuesday I presented a recent paper by Ernst Fehr and...
Monday, November 10, 2008
Many apologies for the lack of posting. I have been working hard with coursework as well as having had a horrid cold which became a chest infection. I will return to customary blogging so...
Tuesday, November 04, 2008
I want to commend my friend Dave Ansara for his tireless work over the last few days to report on the convention for the development of the new party, the South African Democratic Congress (SADC). He managed to interview a few interesting people at the convention, including Mluleki George and Smuts Ngonyama. I've linked to each of the interviews below . He has audio and transcripts of each interview, as well as a transcript of a comment made by Helen...
Cutler & Delong - Obama can Cure Health Care's IllsRobert Frank - Wealth Gap is Focus Even as it ShrinksBrad DeLong - Stocks and the Long Run Robert Shiller - Changing the Crowd in Whispers, Not ShoutsJames Galbraith - Interview with NYTStan Collender - Response to GalbraithI respect Galbraith and many of the predictions that he made, as well as the points that he makes regularly on economic policy and government, are relevant. Many of his points are, in my view,...
Saturday, November 01, 2008
Crazytalk on Greenspan
Posted by Simon Halliday | Saturday, November 01, 2008 | Category:
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I have read many things on the financial crisis, on Alan Greenspan's confessed amazement at the 'self-interest' of bankers, and so forth. However, this article from Z-Magazine by Frederic takes that cake as the best piece of crazed codswollop that I have read about Greenspan and the financial crisis as a whole. I came to Z-Magzine through an interest in Chomsky and reading his book Understanding Power, some of which I thought was good and insightful, some...
Tuesday, October 28, 2008
Carnival of the Africans #3
Posted by Simon Halliday | Tuesday, October 28, 2008 | Category:
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1 comments
In this month's edition of the Carnival of the Africans I have set out to do two things, first, to find some interesting posts that people have either sent to me, or that I have managed to find myself. Second, I decided that we should have a special place for the launching of the site Stop Danie Krugel and link to several of the posts there. So here goes...General Skepticism and ScienceAngela, the Skeptic Detective, brings us three interesting and entertaining...
Saturday, October 25, 2008
Financial Crisis RelatedEamonn Butler - No Such Thing as a Free LunchJames Livingston - Their Great Depression and Ours Part I and IIBill Moyers interviews James GalbraithGreg Mankiw - But have we learned enough?Andrew Lahde - Letter to FTBarry Eichengreen - New World PragmatismDavid Colander - Trickle Up PlansClaire Berlinski - What the Free Market NeedsEconomist - Into The StormNon-Financial Crisis RelatedDuncan Green - World Health Report 2008: Getting Back to BasicsWill...
Friday, October 24, 2008
The Tiger That Isn't
Posted by Simon Halliday | Friday, October 24, 2008 | Category:
Skepticism
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0
comments
I wanted to promote a podcast - Beauty and the Beast - Numbers and Public Policy - that I recently listened to by Andrew Dilnot, one of the authors of the book The Tiger That Isn't. His co-author is Michael Blastland. Dilnot gave a lecture at the LSE which was put up on the web at UChannel, a fantastic resource for lectures and presentations given at various universities and other institutions. Dilnot's lecture centred around the appalling nature of numeracy in...
Financial Crisis:Joseph Stiglitz - A Crisis of ConfidenceJeffrey Sachs - Seven QuestionsTim Harford - EconopolyRobert Skidelsky - We Forgot Everything Keynes Taught UsDani Rodrik - The Next Stage of the CrisisOther:Chrisopher Hitchens - Vote for ObamaChris Blattman - Interview with Ray Fisman and Ted Mig...
Thursday, October 23, 2008
Religious Norms, Human Capital and Risk
Posted by Simon Halliday | Thursday, October 23, 2008 | Category:
Macroeconomics,
Research Blogging
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0
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Yesterday, I attended an interesting presentation by Matteo Cervellati of the University of Bologna that he gave in the Seminar series at Siena. The title of his paper, co-authored with Marcel Jansen (Universidad Carlos) and Uwe Sunde (Univ. St. Gallen) is "Religious Norms and Long Term Development: Insurance, Human Capital and Technological Change". Here's a section from the abstract of the paper:Under reasonable assumptions, we show that any implementable norm can...
Friday, October 17, 2008
Call for Posts - Carnival of the Africans # 3
Posted by Simon Halliday | Friday, October 17, 2008 | Category:
Carnival of the Africans,
Skepticism,
South Africa
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0
comments
I am hosting the third Carnival of the Africans on October 28th. Please send all your posts on things skeptical, scientific and social scientific to simon.d.halliday{at}gmail.com (which I do without the 'at' sign in order to confound bots of evilness, &c) by 8am (GMT+2) of October 27th (one day prior to the carnival). I start my second year of PhD coursework on Monday the 20th, so please do me the little favour of getting the posts into me that day early...
Tuesday, October 14, 2008
On the financial crisis:Luigi Zingales - Plan B (very good)Vernon L. Smith - There's No Easy Way Out of the Bubble Ben Bernanke - We're Laying the Groundwork for RecoveryVox EU Publications - Rescuing Our Jobs and SavingsNYT - US investing $250 Billion in Banks (this is simply wow, almost unbelievable, part of me is worried about the 'preferred stock' idea, but not too sure right now, see graphic adjacent)Vox EU - Financial Development at RiskCass Sunstein - Wall Street's...
At least for Iceland, the import-dependent country of 320 000 inhabitants: the Icelandic currency, the krona, has depreciated so dramatically while its three main banks went bust that imports have frozen up because foreign currency has become unavailable. Markets are clearing, not in the economic sense, but in the sense that they are really drying up of goods. It makes the optimist in me worry. See the Bloomberg article here.&nb...
Monday, October 13, 2008
Paul Krugman - Nobel Laureate
Posted by Simon Halliday | Monday, October 13, 2008 | Category:
Macroeconomics
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3
comments
Paul Krugman was just announced as the winner of the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2008, supposedly for his "analysis of trade patterns and location of economic activity". Go Paul Krugman! Krugman is a professor of Economics at Princeton University (and before that MIT,Yale, LSE, &c). Currently, Krugman has advocated nationalization of bank debt - i.e. injections of liquidity by buying government buying up bad debt but...
Several people have, of late, said to me, "Well, this must be the end of American-style capitalism." I don't really know what they mean - 'the end of capitalism?' I don't think so. To me, capitalism is about having markets with individuals interacting in the markets which allow market mechanisms to allocate scarce resources to people who want them the most, be these resources cigarettes, plants, pencils, white collar labour, blue collar labour, what have you. That...
Thursday, October 09, 2008
Financial Crisis Links
Posted by Simon Halliday | Thursday, October 09, 2008 | Category:
Lazy Linking,
Macroeconomics
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0
comments
Nicholas Bloom - The Credit Crunch may cause another great depressionGary Becker - We're not headed for a depressionAvinash Persaud - How Risk Sensitivity led to the Greatest Financial Crisis of Modern TimesJames K. Galbraith - Goodbye, Conservatives. Hello, PredatorsEsther Duflo - Too many bankersMark Thoma - What Caused the Financial CrisisChristopher Carroll - Capitalism and SkepticismPaul Romer - Fundamentalists vs. RealistsMark Thoma - The Bernson PlanPaul Krugman...
Tuesday, October 07, 2008
Egalitarians behave 'trustworthily', Egotists don't
Posted by Simon Halliday | Tuesday, October 07, 2008 | Category:
Behavioural Economics,
experimental economics,
Microeconomics,
Research Blogging
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0
comments
Ok, so the title of the post gives the paper more pizzazz than it really has, but hey? Today, a little discussion about Nava Ashraf, Iris Bohnet and Nikita Piankov's (2006) paper 'Decomposing Trust and Trustworthiness'.The main reason that it is of interest to me is that it used a sample of students from South Africa in Cape Town (which somehow was spelt Capetown in the paper, ATROCIOUS editing!), along with students from Boston, US and Moscow, Russia.The next point...
Experimenter bias is not a well-covered topic in the area of experimental economics, either because those who decide to test it don't find anything worth reporting, or those who do attempt to test it struggle to be published. Who knows?Nevertheless, a 2004 working paper by Alessandro Innocenti and Maria Grazia Pazienza addresses the question of experimenter bias with respect to the gender of the experimenter. They used the trust game with various treatments to check...
Monday, October 06, 2008
Financial Crisis Stuff
Posted by Simon Halliday | Monday, October 06, 2008 | Category:
Lazy Linking,
Macroeconomics
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0
comments
As the token economist amongst friends and family, I thought I would recommend the following links on the current financial crisis. First, Wikipedia has a fantastic timeline of the current crisis, under the title 'Subprime Crisis Impact Timeline'. Second, you can peruse these useful notes by Roger Congleton of GMU (they follow the GMU line somewhat, so take the ideology of them with a pinch of salt, but read them anyway).Third, there is a new blog documenting the financial...
Thursday, October 02, 2008
...to those at Intrade. It looks like Obama has overtaken McCain substantially once more. Ahhh... the effects of Pa(l)in bring me j...
Wednesday, October 01, 2008
Duncan Green - How Much Is $700bnFT - Zuma Will Struggle To Fulfil Pledges to PoorAfriCan - Financial Market Turmoil and AfricaEconomix - Names for the BailoutAP - Understanding the (US) Black-White Earnings GapMcCain's Lies: And a fantastic mock loan interview:...
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