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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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

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:...