Karl Deeter asks:
‘If you had one year to turn the economy around or you would be publicly executed, what policies would you enact?’
Well first, what’s the problem?
Oh yeah: soaring unemployment, depression-level falls in aggregate demand, popped construction bubble and poor regulation leading to banks in distress, small and medium enterprises choking for lack of working capital, a government which has just guaranteed the liabilities of the banks in such difficulty in deep year on year budget deficit itself, forcing the government to increase borrowing to finance current expenditure, and widespread dithering, wittering, and gnashing of teeth.
Then Kinsella becomes dictator for a year. Huzzah! A fanfare would be struck up, but, in these straightened times, we can’t afford a band, and no one really feels like a parade, so I’d play the fanfare on iTunes on my laptop for a few minutes. A bottle of warm Miller and a stale cupcake with a candle robbed off a two year old’s birthday ice cream are probably all the largesse the public will extend to me. Assuming I can’t enact anything to get myself out of the death sentence, in answer to Karl’s question, here’s what I’d do, and pronto.
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[From Extrapolating]
I had a very unpleasant day today, for loads of reasons. One email which caught my eye and drew my attention away from the unpleasantness was a question from a commentator who wishes to remain anonymous. He asked me:
Why do Irish people persist in thinking that they are in a country of their own? Surely it’s obvious you are just a small region in a huge pan European system. You’ve never really had any autonomy as a nation economically. Either you go with the flow, or you get crucified, it’s as simple as that. First you were part of the UK, then you essentially acted as if you were part of the UK for most of the 20th Century, then you joined the EU in a flash of pragmatism. When it comes to the big things like monetary policy and the world economy, you just don’t matter. So why get all upset by the fact your politicians can’t do anything? It’s like being upset at a local representative when the real decision are being made in Washington DC. It’s just pointless, wouldn’t you agree?
No, I don’t agree, but I see where the commentator is coming from.
The Great One opines on an economic future where a run on the dollar collapses the US economy, sending global markets to very bad place. He also takes some responsibility for training the people who created the mathematical instruments which helped cause the crash, as Nassim Taleb would say, allowed the finance professors tolecture birds on how to fly.
Here’s Samuelson:
Mea culpa, mea culpa. MIT and Wharton and University of Chicago created the financial engineering instruments, which, like Samson and Delilah, blinded every CEO — they didn’t realize the kind of leverage they were doing and they didn’t understand when they were really creating a real profit or a fictitious one. There ’s a lot of causality in economics, even though it’s very far from an exact science.
[From An Interview With Paul Samuelson, Part Two - Conor Clarke]
Ridiculously busy today with deadlines, but here’s a quick quote from Prof. Joe Lee’s Ireland 1912-1985, p. 631, which I took from Michael O’Sullivan’s Ireland and the Global Question.
Small states must rely heavily on the quality of their strategic thinking to counter their vulnerability to international influences.
Think we’ve done that well, recently? The quote struck me as apposite having read this.
The fantastic Irish Economy Blog, which has been setting the terms of the public economic debate, and influencing the news cycle on economic matters for some time, has started a thread on whether ’stimulus’ is a good idea or not. Click the link below to follow the thread of comments as they unfold. This will be fascinating.
Stimulus is a term being used these days by a wide range of people across the political divide. Unions, business groups, Fine Gael, Labour—everyone has a stimulus plan. Everyone, of course, apart from the poor old government. And, indeed, the vast majority of mainstream economists in the country. Since the term keeps popping up everywhere, I thought it might be useful to open a debate about it here, outlining why I have not joined the public clamour calling for stimulus. [From The Irish Economy ]
Stimulus is a term being used these days by a wide range of people across the political divide. Unions, business groups, Fine Gael, Labour—everyone has a stimulus plan. Everyone, of course, apart from the poor old government. And, indeed, the vast majority of mainstream economists in the country. Since the term keeps popping up everywhere, I thought it might be useful to open a debate about it here, outlining why I have not joined the public clamour calling for stimulus.
[From The Irish Economy ]
Dave, my mind is going,” HAL says, forlornly. “I can feel it. I can feel it.”(1)
Recently I’ve spent some time reading and thinking about Ireland’s children. Our kids have the curious distinction of being the first generation of digital natives, and many books (like this one and this one) are now being written to help older generations understand the altered existence their kids have, relative to the teenaged experience we (or our parents) had. There are some who think the state of continuous partial attention (or permanent distraction) brought about by constant exposure to different streams of information from many sources is causing more problems than it might solve.
David Meyer is professor of psychology at the University of Michigan. In 1995 his son was killed by a distracted driver who ran a red light. Meyer’s speciality was attention: how we focus on one thing rather than another. Attention is the golden key to the mystery of human consciousness; it might one day tell us how we make the world in our heads. Attention comes naturally to us; attending to what matters is how we survive and define ourselves. The opposite of attention is distraction, an unnatural condition and one that, as Meyer discovered in 1995, kills. Now he is convinced that chronic, long-term distraction is as dangerous as cigarette smoking. In particular, there is the great myth of multitasking. No human being, he says, can effectively write an e-mail and speak on the telephone. Both activities use language and the language channel in the brain can’t cope. Multitaskers fool themselves by rapidly switching attention and, as a result, their output deteriorates. [...] Chronic distraction, from which we all now suffer, kills you more slowly. Meyer says there is evidence that people in chronically distracted jobs are, in early middle age, appearing with the same symptoms of burn-out as air traffic controllers. They might have stress-related diseases, even irreversible brain damage. But the damage is not caused by overwork, it’s caused by multiple distracted work. One American study found that interruptions take up 2.1 hours of the average knowledge worker’s day. This, it was estimated, cost the US economy $588 billion a year. Yet the rabidly multitasking distractee is seen as some kind of social and economic ideal.
David Meyer is professor of psychology at the University of Michigan. In 1995 his son was killed by a distracted driver who ran a red light. Meyer’s speciality was attention: how we focus on one thing rather than another. Attention is the golden key to the mystery of human consciousness; it might one day tell us how we make the world in our heads. Attention comes naturally to us; attending to what matters is how we survive and define ourselves.
The opposite of attention is distraction, an unnatural condition and one that, as Meyer discovered in 1995, kills. Now he is convinced that chronic, long-term distraction is as dangerous as cigarette smoking. In particular, there is the great myth of multitasking. No human being, he says, can effectively write an e-mail and speak on the telephone. Both activities use language and the language channel in the brain can’t cope. Multitaskers fool themselves by rapidly switching attention and, as a result, their output deteriorates.
[...]
Chronic distraction, from which we all now suffer, kills you more slowly. Meyer says there is evidence that people in chronically distracted jobs are, in early middle age, appearing with the same symptoms of burn-out as air traffic controllers. They might have stress-related diseases, even irreversible brain damage. But the damage is not caused by overwork, it’s caused by multiple distracted work. One American study found that interruptions take up 2.1 hours of the average knowledge worker’s day. This, it was estimated, cost the US economy $588 billion a year. Yet the rabidly multitasking distractee is seen as some kind of social and economic ideal.
So, are our kids going to be a generation of information nibbling bilbliophobes with the short term memory of a heroin-addicted goldfish? Most likely not, though several professors seem to feel so, and Nicholas Carr of The Atlantic chronicles their experiences:
“I was a lit major in college, and used to be [a] voracious book reader,” he wrote. “What happened?” He speculates on the answer: “What if I do all my reading on the web not so much because the way I read has changed, i.e. I’m just seeking convenience, but because the way I THINK has changed?”
“I can’t read War and Peace anymore,” he admitted. “I’ve lost the ability to do that. Even a blog post of more than three or four paragraphs is too much to absorb. I skim it.”
It’s telling that Carr’s article takes us back to the 1880’s, to Philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche and his decision to buy a typewriter. The effect of changing from hand-written text to typewritten text had an effect on the character of the great man’s thought his readers could sense. Nietzsche wrote (or typed) that
“our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts.”
So with our reading equipment–books versus screens and e-book readers.
To see the difference in attitude a change of medium can affect, read this article on getting a word processor for the first time—in 1982.
Assuming the time allocated to gathering information hasn’t increased by much recently, and with more and more light reading taking place online, less and less light reading will be done, implying a collapse of demand for traditional light reading, like magazines. Do we see this happening? Hell yeah.
Lad’s magazines, teenaged magazines, and general magazines all saw their circulations fall, year on year, in the last 3 years. News magazines like The Economist have fared much better.
There’s more to be written on this topic, as it is perennial. We’ll never understand our children’s generation. Nor will they understand their children’s generation. That seems to be the way of things. But it does get a lot of books published.
I’m thinking about next semester’s seminar series today, and came across this fascinating exchange on Brad DeLong’s blog about academic cultures regarding interruptions during a talk. At UL, we have a very sympathetic culture to the speakers who come here, and we’re keen to engage their ideas without necessarily being overly critical. When I studied at the New School in New York, you’d want to bring a sword, bandages, and some vodka to any presentation given by an external speaker. And at NUI, Galway, it varied, depending on which members of the faculty were in the audience at the time—I remember there being blood on the walls at brown bag seminars, and more often than not it was mine. Read the comments to the post as well, the exchange is great.
Economists are used to situations in which you are supposed to be quiet until the paper-giver has finished speaking, only those are not “workshops” but rather “conference presentations.” A conference presentation would, typically, have the presenter speak for 30 minutes, an assigned discussant speak for 10, the presenter respond for 5, and then 15 minutes for questions from the floor and answers by the presenter. It’s not a discipline-wide norm that economists follow in workshops, but rather one specific to the format of the “workshop.” The difference between interrupting and non-interrupting cultures is not a simple and arbitrary choice of social norm, but instead reflects a judgment about whose words are likely to be most valuable to hear. In an “interrupting culture” the presumption is that everyone has read and thought about the paper beforehand, and that to spend half or more of the available time with the presenter simply summarizing the paper (or, worse, reading large chunks of it) is a waste of everybody’s time. Much better to have people raise and argue the points that puzzled them or that they think need to be expanded at their appropriate place in the argument. Moreover, when questions are asked in non-interrupting cultures at the end of the seminar, they don’t lead to any discussion: questions come in response to things the presenter said 15, 30, or 45 minutes ago, and lead to formulaic thrust-and-parry-and-end rather than any more complex discussion. Now in a conference, where the presenter and the discussant are up at front for a reason, and where many in the audience have indeed not read the paper, the noninterrupting culture format makes a certain amount of sense. But in a workshop it does not. The noninterrupting culture format is, in the last analysis, one that does even the presenter no favors. It greatly diminishes the fraction of the audience that will read the paper beforehand–for everyone knows that the presenter is going to eat up the lion’s share of the time going over it with everyone else sitting around like bumps on a log. A good presenter is more interested in what an intelligent and thoughtful audience thinks of his or her argument than in listening to himself or herself summarize the paper one more time. And if for some reason the presenter gets off on the wrong foot and does not make contact with the audience, then an interrupting culture gives the presenter clues that may allow him or her to adjust on the fly and reconnect. In a non-interrupting culture–no chance of that. [From The Duties and Privileges of an Academic Speaker]
Economists are used to situations in which you are supposed to be quiet until the paper-giver has finished speaking, only those are not “workshops” but rather “conference presentations.” A conference presentation would, typically, have the presenter speak for 30 minutes, an assigned discussant speak for 10, the presenter respond for 5, and then 15 minutes for questions from the floor and answers by the presenter. It’s not a discipline-wide norm that economists follow in workshops, but rather one specific to the format of the “workshop.”
The difference between interrupting and non-interrupting cultures is not a simple and arbitrary choice of social norm, but instead reflects a judgment about whose words are likely to be most valuable to hear. In an “interrupting culture” the presumption is that everyone has read and thought about the paper beforehand, and that to spend half or more of the available time with the presenter simply summarizing the paper (or, worse, reading large chunks of it) is a waste of everybody’s time. Much better to have people raise and argue the points that puzzled them or that they think need to be expanded at their appropriate place in the argument. Moreover, when questions are asked in non-interrupting cultures at the end of the seminar, they don’t lead to any discussion: questions come in response to things the presenter said 15, 30, or 45 minutes ago, and lead to formulaic thrust-and-parry-and-end rather than any more complex discussion. Now in a conference, where the presenter and the discussant are up at front for a reason, and where many in the audience have indeed not read the paper, the noninterrupting culture format makes a certain amount of sense. But in a workshop it does not.
The noninterrupting culture format is, in the last analysis, one that does even the presenter no favors. It greatly diminishes the fraction of the audience that will read the paper beforehand–for everyone knows that the presenter is going to eat up the lion’s share of the time going over it with everyone else sitting around like bumps on a log. A good presenter is more interested in what an intelligent and thoughtful audience thinks of his or her argument than in listening to himself or herself summarize the paper one more time. And if for some reason the presenter gets off on the wrong foot and does not make contact with the audience, then an interrupting culture gives the presenter clues that may allow him or her to adjust on the fly and reconnect. In a non-interrupting culture–no chance of that.
[From The Duties and Privileges of an Academic Speaker]
Here’s a talk I gave on Tuesday to a symposium on Social Media with Prof. Gerry McKiernan, revolving around using social media tools like this blog, the text messaging software, and The Twitter, etc, to communicate and interact with my students. I also spoke about these papers, here, here and here. Slides are below.
Here’s a talk I gave yesterday to CFA Ireland. I had a great time, and the discussion afterwards was enlightening and stimulating. Thanks very much to John and Joe for the invitation. A working paper version of the book chapter the talk is based on is here, and the book itself may be purchased here. The slides I gave are here. Thanks to Karl Deeter for videoing the talk (and the impromptu promotion to Professor-I’m afraid I’m still just a lecturer), and his insightful comments on fiscal policy in particular got me thinking about a new set of ideas on the train home. The entire talk (and the comments given) are here, and a sample of the talk is below.
Apologies if things look wonky today, I’m trying out some new themes/plugins, to simplify the blog and make it a bit more functional.
Congratulations to my Final Year Project Student, Dina Ibragimova, whose FYP on The Economic Performance of Ireland and Latvia from 1990 until 2007 has been awarded the BA in European Studies FYP Prize for 2009. You can take a look at this outstanding piece of work here (pdf, 712kb).
Also congratulations to Lydia Man, one of UL’s new medical students, who was awarded a competitive HRB summer studentship this week.
I’m in Trento, Italy, speaking at this event. Can’t wait to go.
I’ll also be thinking hard about Fergus’ comment.
Here’s my article in The Sunday Times today.
How cool is this? Follow away.
BBS by Flexible Learning Open Evening in UL Tuesday 26th May 5.30pm-7.30pm in the Kemmy Business School
Twitter / KBS: BBS by Flexible Learning O …
Expect the econo-blogosphere to go nuts tearing Minsky apart or trying to put him together, now that PK is on the case.
I’ve given some lectures on Minsky’s ideas as applied to the Irish case, but the best place to get the man’s ideas is in his magnum opus. Which I think is pretty well written, myself.
Limerick – Wolfram|Alpha
