Reverse migration

The Times also reports on outmigration of highly skilled foreign born (or second-generation immigrant American citizens). No doubt these anecdotes are fueled in part by continued macroeconomic weakness and credit market impediments here in the U.S.

The fertility transition in Nigeria

The Times reports on the state of the fertility transition in Nigeria. In the World Bank's WDI, Nigeria's total fertility rate is around 5.6 births per woman or so, down from a high of 6.8 around 1980 but still relatively high even by developing standards. On the second page of the article appears a statement by a mother interviewed in a women's health clinic about the "quantity-quality" tradeoff. Other parts of the article emphasize the history of polygamy, women's roles, and religious views both Catholic and Muslim.

"Battle shock" and suicide in the Confederacy

Another Binghamton historian contributes to the Disunion blog, this time about "battle shock" (or "shell shock"), stress, and suicide among mostly Confederate soldiers.

Inside the debt deal negotiations

There have been two articles about the debt ceiling negotiations last summer between the President and the House, one in the Washington Post, and the other in the New York Times. The former seems to suggest it was the unfortunate timing of an announcement by a bipartisan working group in the Senate that caused Obama to backpedal, feeling he couldn't agree to more spending cuts and fewer tax increases than the Senate. The latter article implies on its first page that it places more blame on House Republicans.

Hacker's new Civil War death toll

An article in the Times describes David Hacker's work on counting Civil War deaths using Census data courtesy of the great repository at IPUMS. The old estimate was 622,511 in the Historical Statistics of the United States;  Hacker's guess is between 650,000 and 850,000.

Rethinking economics education

There are several helpful perspectives in a recent Room-for-Debate from the Times: a call to reemphasize the importance of information asymmetries and their destructive consequences for prices and market equilibria, and a call to refocus attention on economic history. My favorite? A call to teach gardening instead of financial engineering.

Microfounding the IS Curve

In the midst of thinking about presenting the IS Curve to undergraduates, I came across this helpful blog post by Mark Thoma from 10/2011 that discusses David Romer's approach in Advanced Macro 4th ed.  Spending today falls (rises) because the representative consumer (via the Euler condition) substitutes toward (away from) future spending when the interest rate rises (falls).

Maybe I'll present that intuition at some point, but I think undergraduates probably better comprehend the interest rate as the price of borrowing; when borrowing's price rises, borrowing and spending on investment and other durable goods falls.