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 my African Sceptical and Scientific blogroll. Here they are, I will be adding them to my sidebar promptly:

• 01 and the Universe
• Acinonyx Scepticus
• Amanuensis
• Ambient Normality
• Effortless Incitement
• Ewan's Corner
• Ionian Enchantment
• Irreverence
• Limbic Nutrition
• The Little Book of Capoeira
• Other Things Amanzi
• Orion Spur
• Pause and Consider
• Pickled Bushman
• Prometheus Unbound
• psychohistorian.org
• Scorched
• The Science of Sport
• Stop Danie Krugel
• Subtle Shift in Emphasis
• The Skeptic Detective
• Timbuktu Chronicles
• Yet Another Sceptic's Blog

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 here.

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 of his history and his literary ‘processes’. What made reading the book even more fun was the fact that I have met Stanley Wells, who Bryson regularly quotes in the book. He is based at the Shakespeare Institute where Amy (my wife) volunteered during her year in Stratford. He took a shining to her and, consequently, I have met him on several separate occasions. He took Amy and I to lunch when we were in Stratford during August. Paul Edmondson (who presided over our wedding) is also quoted a few times in the book, which made it even more entertaining to talk to Paul about speaking with Bryson about the book: this brought a double joy to the reading. Don't go in expecting a book about the plays, go in expecting a book about Shakespeare, his time and his England.

Talking It Over by Julian Barnes: A fantastic little novel which tells the stories three people (two men and a woman) who end up in a love triangle, each telling the story from their perspective as the narrative progresses. Barnes has a fantastic sense of humour and the voices of each of the characters is distinct and seems to encapsulate that character’s foibles, complexities and modes by which they interact with others. Very funny, and quite deeply satirises certain British stereotypes.

Daniel Martin by John Fowles: Is an epic novel that traces the steps of the title character from a brief retelling of his childhood, to his life as a student at Oxford, to his adult life as a screen- and playwright. The book drips with irony, and, rather like the Magus, you cannot believe that there are so many ways in which characters can interact, or threads by which the narrative can be extended. Still, it is a beautifully written novel, it captures a sense of what it must have been like to be a British scriptwriter or author in the US in Los Angeles, but still retaining an essential Britishness that cannot, or is not, adequately understood by many (North) Americans. It is also interesting because during the writing Fowles often goes on philosophical tangents: he tries to navigate an understanding of the conflicts of capitalism and socialism, something in which I am deeply interested, as well as problems of aesthetics, such as whether art should be instructive or not. It is a challenging, fantastically written and epic novel. It makes me want to retrace the routes that the characters do to remote places in the US, certains spots in the UK (yes the UK does have remote beautiful areas) and also Egypt. I'd give this book a big thumbs up if you can deal with his occasional over-writing.

Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison: I enjoyed this book far more than I
enjoyed the previous book of hers that I read, Beloved. Beloved was very well-
written and understandably lauded (for example the New York Times did a survey of American authors and they voted it as the best American novel of the past 25 years). However, I found the writing style of Song of Solomon easier to read, as well as finding it more manageable in terms of the characters and narrative Morrison introduced. The main character’s name is Macon Dead, an African American growing up in the US during the period spanning the 1940s to 60s. Morrison tells his life: how his experience, as the son of an African American who owns property is both an intrinsically African American experience, but also distinctly not African American in the advantages that he has because of his father being a property owner. Combine this with a backdrop of odd family members, a narrative that takes you back to his grandparents and their tale and the book makes for riveting reading - it's a window into the paradoxed of African American life in 20th Century USA.

Divisadero by Michael Ondaatje: I picked this up in Borders Bookstore in Heathrow's Terminal 3 to read on my flight back to Cape Town. I read about half of it on the flight, distracted by action movies, mindless entertainment and the copy of Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers that I have on my ipod (not quite finished more on that book another time). Anyway, this book is somehow caressingly written, as if Ondaatje is drawing you in with the lyrical nature of his writing, drawing you in to the stories of how people love one another, how it damages them, how it helps to construct who they are. This is the second novel of his that I have read (The English Patient was my first, glorious delving into Ondaatje's fiction) and it contrasts oddly with his poetry, which I find to be more comical and more playful, definitely more playful with respect to how he treats and interacts with words. Nevertheless, this book is wonderful and now that it is in soft-cover it constitutes a good gift to the Ondaatje uninitiated.

Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely: This book constitutes a fun introduction to a fairly limited draw of modern experimental economics and social psychology, the barried between the two is quite small with respect to what Ariely does as I would not always call what he does 'experimental economics'. Although I think that Ariely does some intriguing and worthwhile work, he suffers from the experimentalists Achilles' Heel (in my mind) in that he overstates the parallelism, or generalizability, of the results that he obtains in small-scale and localized experiments. I don't believe that he gives sufficient credence to cultural difference, or to heterogeneity of individual responses. That being said, I would recommend this book to most critical thinkers as it restates many examples of how we, as humans, thinking irrationally and do it in a predictable manner. For as many overly general or slightly inaccurate statements that he makes, Ariely makes many more that are worthy of our consideration in modern economics and psychology, especially in the contemporary crisis-wracked world.

Experimental Methods: A Primer for Economists by D. Friedman and S. Sunder is a book from which I read a chapter or two for a course on decision theory and behavioral economics. I decided to read the book and found it very valuable. Most of my reading in experimental economics has tended towards individual decision-making and individual preferences, the book, though quite dated (published in 1994) now in terms of the field, but is still a classic. They have a significant focus on market, auction and asset-market experiments with barely a mention of preference-based experiments, yet they provide general guidelines for conceiving and implementing experiments, data analysis and writing up that are very valuable. The book is an easy read and I found it worthwhile considering how I want to undertake experiments as part of my disseration research.

Otherwise, I am reading a book of Italian Short Stories, Gladwell's Outliers as mentioned, a book on Italian History, and another on neuroeconomics, in addition to which I am still doing my best to read Adam Smith's The Theory of Moral Sentiments when I have the time (and the patience). Oh yes, I also forgot to mention reading the inestimable 'On Liberty', but I don't believe that I can add much to criticisms or laudatory remarks on that book as it really is one of the great texts in philosophy (or so I believe, whether you disagree with its conclusions or not). Sherbet, I also realise I read Marx and Engels's Communist Manifesto for the first time, I found it interesting with some of the content agreeable and other content particularly disagreeable, but I suppose that was bound to happen. I know I am forgetting others, but this will have to do for now.

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 Feedbacks in the Economy', Scientific American, Feb 1990.
Paul A. David, Clio and the Economics of QWERTY, AER, May 1985.

I am hoping to get some lights on in the minds of some of the kids by doing a question-based discussion of the papers. I want them to engage with the readings and come up with their own ideas, I know such intentions may be naive but I remain optimistic. Even if only 1-5 of the 65 students gains some insight and some ability to think better about the world as a consequence of the discussion (rather than a straight up lecture) then I will be happy. In fact, I am guaranteed at least one with a bright and engaging student who I see is getting a fair amount from my lecturing, but I am hoping to get more than four more students to have something more than crepuscular lights going on in their heads.

Does anyone have specific ideas for South African situations of lock-in, network effects resulting in monopoly and irreversibility of investment resulting in monopoly type market dominance?

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 future of the country, as well as (overly?) optimistic about the economic potential of South Africa. I had one of the secretaries in the department ask me if I didn't want to stay on to lecture this same course during the semester, as much as I would love to I need to complete my PhD else no employment for the white male in SA in an academic institution. Note that this is said with no sense of unjustness, but simply a statement of fact. I cannot think of how any (economics) department in South Africa could offer a white male anything resembling a permanent position without them having a worthwhile PhD and some publications. Hence, I will apply to UCT when I am approaching the end of my PhD and I have some job market papers, in the meant time ad hoc work if and when they need me!

So yes, if you are in Cape Town or the vicinity and would like to see me then give me a shout. I look forward to hearing from you. I'll try to keep up a semblance of blogging even though I am teaching. Maybe I will be inspired by my minions (read students) to deal with interesting questions. Or maybe not.

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 Irrational, some of which I find interesting and to be of high quality, and other parts of which I think she would be left to the Department of Huh?

The reason I make the DoH comment is that I think that Ariely plays it a little bit loose with the ideas of parallelism and generalizability. What I mean here is that if you consider the experiment he talks about in the article, i.e. using people in India to mimic the working hours and payments of low, middle and high management is your sample in fact similar to that of the people who actually work in those jobs? I don't believe that the people who are the CEOs of the top companies in the world and who receive the inordinately high bonuses and salaries that they do are, in fact, like your average employee. I am not claiming that they are necessarily more intelligent, or that they have higher IQs, that could be the case. It could also be that they have way better social skills than anyone else you know, or that they need only to sleep four hours a night and get huge amounts of work done, or that they are simply more cut-throat, more ruthless and more savage with their opponents than your average Joe (the plumber). Consequently, getting a sample of average people and paying them more and they respond by working less than the medium and low paid people is odd, it is something that warrants its own explanation as an idea and argument separate to that made by Ariely. It cannot be extended to CEO, CFO, etc salary problems.

What do we need to understand for this? First, are CEOs paid less when they perform badly? Are they paid less when they did the same stupid thing that everyone else did? If they truly are miraculously talented people they should be able to see when other people are getting things wrong and they should have the guts, intellect and arguments to say 'X is getting Z wrong, so we should do Y instead of W.' CEO behavior should not simply be a case of bandwagon effects. What does this mean? More CEOs, especially in the US, should lose their jobs. They should not be given bonuses when their company performs, say, a standard deviation below the average. Moreover, during this period when a recession flows sweetly onwards and the ghosts of a possible depression haunts us, they should not be rewarding themselves, or even allowing their boards to reward them, when they should be doing everything they can to keep their jobs, keep the jobs of those below them and make their companies money. This is what normal salaries are for, not salaries that are more than 300 times the average are for. So yes CEOs could be paid less, but don't go making arguments about them being lazy, unintelligent or stupid. They're probably just greedy.

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 of them believing the legislation to be Anti-Islamist? I hope that antipathy doesn't rise as a consequence, but I can't see how it won't. I also don't see it dramatically altering the lives of many in the near future, the reason being that it would require intervention from someone who is a) aware of the rights of the partner but who is not complicit with the agreement which is unlikely, or b) the partner who is being forced into the marriage to be aware of their freedoms in the UK and to elect to abandon family, culture, etc in order to get out of the marriage. I am not convinced that this will happen as much as we might like to think it would.

Lastly, are there unintended consequences? For example, Man1, Man2 and Woman 1. Man 1 marries Woman 1 and it is a freely chosen arrangement, no forcing. Man 2 is jealous because he wanted Woman 1 and now lodges charges of forced marriage against Man 1. Will this, or permutations of this, occur? I hope not, but I am not convinced that it won't.

Note though that my personal stance is that the legislation is necessary to protect women's rights.

HT: MD.

Second item on the agenda: supposedly there have been responses by high income individuals the likes of which we might not have considered. Many who have mistresses, or even possibly high paid courtesans, are considering major cutbacks in their spending or abandoning their mistresses entirely. Anyway, what I realised was how this was all from a man's perspective. Do high paid female professionals not seek young virile men and support them with their large paychecks? One, the sample is problematic because there are probably dramatically more men in these high paid jobs because of under-representation of women in those high paid positions, as is still the case in the US. Moreover, and not to diminish the sexuality of women in any way, it would not surprise me if the demand by men, in general, for such services is probably significantly higher than it is for women. Moral of the story? High paid courtesans and mistresses (who are not paid, but who are bought gifts, have their apartments paid for, etc) are luxury goods - a shock to income reduces demand.

HT: GMB.

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 assumptions.

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.

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 the likelihood of events. Anscombe and Aumann later synthesised these two theories to devise a theory that included both subjective and objective probabilities. Nevertheless, the goal for all of this the Expected Utilty Representation of a Utility Function, i.e. representing a utility such that it can be decomposed into the probability of obtaining specific utility amounts and that this can be done in an additively separable manner (this is less complex than it sounds).

However, the problem is that humans often don't behave consistent with the axioms of Von Neumann and Morgenstern, Savage, or Anscombe and Aumann. Allais showed this in his 1952 paper. Kahneman and Tversky (K&T), two psychologists who shifted into economic choice theory, also did work on this in 1979 and subsequently. Previously, I had 'studied' their theory, called 'prospect theory' previously from textbooks, but had not read their original 1979 paper. It is part of our compulsory reading list for this course and so I recently read it. K&T used many surveys to try to come up with an idea of how people responded to risk, to uncertainty over outcomes. In orthodox economic theory an amount of money should be 'state neutral', i.e. you should treat 500 currency units (CUs) in the same manner regardless of whether you are going to gain that money or lose it. However, their evidence indicates that people treat losses and gains differently. People are 'risk-averse' over gains, but 'risk-loving' over losses. I will go over this in a moment.

Take the following example. You are given the choice between R450 for certain or a lottery which involves a 50% chance of winning R1000 and a 50% of getting nothing. The expected value of the lottery (the sum of the probability multiplied by the amount to be won) is R500, which is strictly greater than R450. A 'rational' person should therefore choose the lottery. However, people seem to prefer the situation in which they gain the money for certain. People are therefore 'risk-averse' over gains.

Now take another example. You are offered the following choice. You either lose R3000 for certain, or you face a lottery in which you lose R4000 with 80% probability or lose nothing, R0, with probability 20%. The expected loss of the lottery is R3200. A 'rational' person would thus choose the certain loss. However, empirically, people choose the second option in which they face a lottery rather than the certain loss. People are therefore 'risk-loving' over losses.

These conclusions are in direct conflict with orthodox decision theory. Now, I think that VNM, Savage and A&A provide graceful mathematical depictions of potential behavior. However, they postulate humans with decision capabilities and computational abilities the likes of which I believe are truly miraculous. Savage, for example, talks about being able to partition sets of events into smaller sets of equiprobable events in order for them to be able to rank different sets of events, this would require a super-machine, or a person who is entirely unlike me in their decision capabilities.

K&T's theories should also be seen as largely descriptive. They have taken data and constructed a model that would represent behavior that is consistent with the behave that they observe when people make decisions. This area of decision theory has seen several developments in recent times with Gilboa being the champion of its development, I don't know if I can comprehend Gilboa's math, but hey I'll try and I'll let you know one day... For now it's good to know though that economic theory is doing its best to construct models that use assumptions that are closer to the actual behavior of people, rather than abstract and incorrect postulates of (in)human conduct.

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 all became even clearer for me recently when a Roman friend of mine described his experiences playing rugby. He'd played a bit as a kid when in Brussels and decided to take it up in Rome, he told me how the players tell one another, when in a ruck or scrum when trying to obtain the ball to 'Caccia il negro', which translates literally as 'hunt the nigger', in fact the ball is often just referred to as 'il negro'. I recalled my own teammates saying this but I didn't understand at that point in time because my Italian was barely sufficient to say my name, let along understood colloquial racist slurs.

On top of this, the beliefs South Africans have about 'right wing' Afrikaners and Rugby is nothing compared to the fascists I met when playing rugby, and the fascist tendencies that my friend described to me of the team he tried to play with (and subsequently left). Absolute belief that Mussolini was dead right, swastika tattoos, immigrant haters (though they don't mind blonde, white English or US immigrants) and more. Crazy times.

Anyway, so if you thought SA had problems with racism and rugby, or politics and rugby, think again. Yes, it is occasionally bad in SA, but at least you don't hear about South African Afrikaans teams saying 'hunt the k***'. Ah... Europe.

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. As a consequence of introducing payments for blood altruists were crowded out and drug users tried to use the system to get money. After several blunders this was corrected for and donors went through stricter screening procedures.

Anyway, the point is that I think that probably, in the case of sperm where there is a clause that allows the child to find out the identity of their donor-parent when they are 18 (a historical anonymity clause was repealed) they system could allow for improvements in the number of individuals who donate, assuming that the Titmuss related altruists are not crowded out by the introduction of material incentives and that the screening protocols result in no addicts and STD carriers donating sperm.

One of the other commenters noted how sperm donations have gone up regardless of the introduction of the new clause. I would not claim the new clause was causative in any way. However, there are still several thousand people who fall short of getting sperm for their babes. Crazy times.

Would I consider donating sperm? I don't know. I'd have to ask my wife's opinion on the potential of having a child with my genetic material whom I had not conceived with her potentially arriving on the scene in 18 or so years time. Might material incentives help? Well, it depends on how big they are? Also, do they just want sperm, or do they want high quality nerdy sperm (if I may be so bold, lol)? If so then maybe I should donate. Still unresolved though. It's those little touches of altruism...

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 that are already occurring because of altruism. Instead it should, somehow, maintain these altruistic incentives while also allowing those who would be positively incentivised to donate because of material incentives to enter into the market.

I am not sure how to do this as of yet. But I still think it is something to which we should aspire. Far too many people are dying and, until we can artificially construct new organs (one day...), offering material incentives is one option that just has not been explored. There are many ways to offer payments if you are worried about it being callous, and I believe it can be done in a way that allows for longer life for those who want it and increases in welfare for those who needed the money in the first place.

Another article to look at on the problem of the introduction of material incentives is Sam Bowles' recent article, on which I blogged here.

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 Lorenz Goette, "Do Workers Work More if Wages Are High? Evidence from a Randomized Field Experiment." There are two purposes to the paper:

1. to demonstrate that there is a negative effort response to an increase in wage rates, even though there is an overall increase in wage supply
2. to explain that the loss-averse workers among those in the sample of experimental subjects are those whose actions resulted in the negative wage-effort relationship.
   

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 of interest is that, unlike many economic experiments, it assesses within-subject variation across two different games, the dictator game and the trust or 'investment' game.

The authors had 4 main hypotheses that they wished to test:

1. Trust is only based on expectations of trustworthiness.
2. Trust is only based on unconditional kindness.
   
3. Trustworthiness is only based on reciprocity.
4. Trustworthiness is only based on unconditional kindness.
   

Our results suggest that many people may play a different game than researchers thought they were playing when confronted with the “investment game.” Only 36 percent of the 159 trustors who decided to send any money in our “investment game” expected to make money (204).

Our design allowed us to solve one of the important trust puzzles, namely that people trust even though hardly anyone makes money by doing so. We found that generally, people are aware of this. They trust even though they know it does not pay monetarily. They enjoy the act of trusting and being kind to others, even to anonymous strangers (204).

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 whether the gender of the experimenter changed any of the responses by the subjects. The trust game involves a pairing of two individuals (a sender and a receiver), the sender chooses to 'invest' an amount in the other person (trust element), this amount is then tripled in value and the receiver may then choose to send some money back to the sender (reciprocity element).

There results were as follows:

1. There was no evidence that the gender of the experimenter affected the degree of trust.
   
2. The presence of a female experimenter was correlated with a statistically significant higher degree of reciprocity.
   
3. The effect (of female experimenter reciprocity inflation) occurred across the genders of the subjects, i.e. it was not a 'correspondence' effect of woman-to-woman as some might argue.
   

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 crisis: The Money Meltdown.

Fourth, there are several blogs that I read with commentary on the crisis that I would recommend: Marginal Revolution, The Semi-daily Journal of Brad DeLong, Greg Mankiw, Paul Krugman and Mark Thoma's Economist's View. Mankiw regularly gives interesting and brief insights, as well as giving links to good articles by prominent individuals. Thoma cites articles at length and gives his own commentary.

Fifth, don't believe what everyone has to tell you about Adam Smith and the financial crisis. Read what Gavin Kennedy has to say here, here and here on his blog 'Adam Smith's Lost Legacy'.

Sixth, Duncan Green, the head of research for Oxfam, maintains a blog and has couple of posts on the topic of the financial crisis and development, the most interesting post of which is a discussion of what $700bn would do for global development.

Lastly, some audio and video stuff. EconTalk host Russ Roberts chats with Arnold Kling on the role of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. I found this very useful for helping me to understand what exactly they did and, thus, how they impacted on the financial crisis. Roberts also interviewed Robert Shiller (of the Case-Shiller (housing) index fame) on housing bubbles, which I found interesting. UChannel, another audio and film 'academic' web resource, has a discussion featuring Paul Krugman and Alan Blinder, both of whom have been quite outspoken on the crisis and its possible solutions. Krugman especially is a fan of nationalizing Fannie and Freddie.

Ok, that's enough for now and should sate any financial crisis appetite for the moment.

...to those at Intrade. It looks like Obama has overtaken McCain substantially once more. Ahhh... the effects of Pa(l)in bring me joy.